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"William Wilson" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in The Gift, with a setting inspired by Poe's formative years on the outskirts of London. The tale features a doppelgänger .
The complete, unabridged text of William Wilson by Edgar Allan Poe, with vocabulary words and definitions.
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‘William Wilson’: summary. First, a brief summary of the plot of ‘William Wilson’. The narrator tells us that although the path to evil is commonly assumed to be a slippery slope, for him it was more of a steep and rapid decline – very suddenly, he found himself capable of acts of extreme depravity.
Wilson staggered through the feeble light of dawn to the vestibule and there he barely perceived a young man, dressed as Wilson was, in the latest fashion. The stranger strode up, seized Wilson by the arm and whispered "William Wilson!" in his ear. Wilson became sober in an instant.
“William Wilson” is Poe’s most sustained character study of the doppelganger, or double, a theme explored in a similar way recently by the popular film Fight Club. Poe doubles the twins Roderick and Madeline Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and in “William Wilson.”
"William Wilson" is a short story by celebrated American writer Edgar Allan Poe. First published in an 1839 issue of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, the story later appeared in the 1840 Poe anthology, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
