The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher is a short story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 and collected a year later in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.

The narrator arrives at the Usher house to find a building with a crack running down its front and a friend whose nerves have collapsed into something close to terror. Roderick Usher is the last male of his line, and he believes that the house itself is alive and that his sister Madeline, who is also his only relative, will die soon. To pass the time the narrator reads to him and listens to him play; the two of them are alone in a house that has been kept up barely at all. When Madeline does die, Roderick decides that her body should be kept for a fortnight in one of the vaults under the house, and the narrator helps him carry her there. Poe writes the story in a single sustained pitch of dread, and the language of the house and its inhabitants is deliberately vague about what is actually happening and what is being imagined.

It is one of the most discussed short stories in American literature, and the family, the house and the illness are all presented as a single failing organism.