BY EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)


[_Setting_. Sullivan's Island is at the entrance of Charleston harbor,
just east of Charleston, South Carolina. It is the site of Fort
Moultrie, where Poe served as a private soldier in Battery H of the
First Artillery, United States Army, from November, 1827, to November,
1828. The atmosphere of the place in Poe's time is well preserved, but
no such beetle as the gold-bug has been discovered. Poe may have found a
hint for his story in the wreck of the old brigantine _Cid Campeador_
off the coast of South Carolina in 1745, the affidavits of the burying
of the treasure being still preserved in the Probate Court Records of
Charleston.

_Plot_. "The Gold-Bug" is recognized as one of the world's greatest
short stories and marks a distinct advance in short-story structure. The
plot is divided into two parts, which we may call mystery and solution,
or complication and explication, or rise and fall. The second part
begins with the short paragraph on page 91, beginning "When, at length,
we had concluded our examination," etc. Notice how skillfully the
interest is preserved and even heightened as the plot passes from the
romantic action of part one to the subtle exposition of part two. These
two parts may be said to represent the two sides of Poe's genius, the
imaginative or poetical, and the intellectual or scientific. The
treasure-trove is the symbol of the first, the cryptogram of the second.
Stories had been written about buried treasures and about cryptograms
before 1843, but the two interests had never before been combined. Poe's
example, however, has borne abundant fruit.