The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. A narrator who insists on his sanity describes how he killed an old man because of his pale, vulture-like eye, and how the imagined beating of the victim's heart drove him to confess.
The story
The narrator lives with an old man he says he loves, but cannot bear his clouded eye. For seven nights he creeps into the room at midnight, and on the eighth he kills him and hides the body under the floorboards.
When police officers call, he receives them calmly, but a low, growing sound he takes for the dead man's heart becomes unbearable, and he shrieks out the truth.
An unreliable narrator
Poe tells the story from inside the murderer's mind. The narrator's frantic insistence on his own calm and cleverness is the clearest sign of his madness.
The short, breathless sentences, dashes and repetitions make the reader feel his rising panic.
Publication
The story first appeared in January 1843 in The Pioneer, a short-lived Boston magazine founded by James Russell Lowell. Poe was paid about ten dollars.
It is one of Poe's most anthologised tales and a classic of psychological horror.
Anecdotes
A forgotten magazine
The Pioneer, where the story first appeared, lasted only three issues; its editor, the poet Lowell, was struck by eye disease and the magazine closed.
Baudelaire's Poe
Charles Baudelaire translated the story into French as Le Cœur révélateur, in the Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires (1857), part of the translations that made Poe famous in France.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the narrator kill the old man?
Because of the old man's pale eye, which he says made his blood run cold.
What makes him confess?
A sound he believes is the dead man's heart still beating under the floor.
When was The Tell-Tale Heart published?
In January 1843, in The Pioneer.