The Fall
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
Where The Fall keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about The Fall
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In a sailors' bar in Amsterdam, a former Paris defense lawyer named Jean-Baptiste Clamence buttonholes a stranger across five nights. He confesses, in monologue, to a moral collapse that began the night a young woman jumped off a bridge.
Multiple works share this title. The metadata above lists Poe, who wrote The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Albert Camus's novel La Chute (1956) is also commonly searched as The Fall. Both are different works by different authors.
Camus's The Fall is short (around 150 pages), structured as a one-sided conversation between an unreliable narrator and an unnamed stranger in an Amsterdam bar. The voice takes adjustment but the prose is clear.
The Fall is 38 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Fall takes most readers under an hour to finish.
The Fall is a standalone novel by Edgar Allan Poe, not part of a series.
The Fall is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
