The Tell-Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1843 in the magazine The Pioneer. Its unnamed narrator insists throughout on their own sanity while confessing to the murder of an old man with whom they lived, a killing the narrator claims was provoked by nothing but the old man's pale, filmy eye, and describes dismembering the body and hiding it beneath the floorboards of the house. When police arrive to investigate a reported disturbance, the narrator's calm unravels under what they perceive as the increasingly loud beating of the dead man's heart from beneath the floor, and the story ends with the narrator's own confession, driven to it by a guilt the narrator can neither name nor control. Poe's use of a confiding, self-justifying narrator whose own words progressively reveal the derangement he denies has made the story one of the most widely read and taught examples of psychological horror in American short fiction.