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reviewed Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes by James Baldwin (Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes)

James Baldwin, Herman Melville, E.B. White, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, T. S. Eliot, Martin Espada, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Edith Wharton, Tom Wolfe, Sherwood Anderson, Kate Chopin, Larry McMurtry, William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates, E. L. Doctorow, Jack London, Mark Twain, Anna Quindlen, Tim O'Brien, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, Grace Paley, Annie Dillard, Carson McCullers, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Toomer, W. H. Auden, Rita Dove, Eudora Welty, Ambrose Bierce, Washington Irving, John Updike, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Edgar Lee Masters, Ian Frazier, Joy Harjo, Alex Haley, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Paine, Anne Tyler, N. Scott Momaday, John Hersey, Emily Dickinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Stephen Crane, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Penn Warren, Amy Tan, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Bernard Malamud, Bret Harte, Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomas Jefferson, Julia Alvarez, Robert E. Lee, Katherine Anne Porter, Naomi Shihab Nye, James Thurber, Carl Sandburg, Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, Robert Hayden, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Margaret Fuller, Chief Joseph, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Frost, Countee Cullen, Wallace Stevens, Arna Wendell Bontemps, Claude McKay, Theodore Roethke, William Stafford, Randall Jarrell, Sojourner Truth, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Simon J. Ortiz, Abigail Adams, Mary Boykin Chesnut, John F. Kennedy, Joel, Billy., Zora Neale Hurston, Joni Mitchell, Anonymous, Meriwether Lewis, Richard Lederer, Adrienne Rich, John Wesley Powell, Bailey White, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jonathan Edwards, Amy K. Duer, Christopher Columbus, Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, Darryl Babe Wilson, John Smith, Edward Taylor, Steve Wulf, Phillis Wheatley, Michel-guillaume Jean De Crevecoeur, Emily Saliers, Angela De Hoyos, Stephen Foster, George Cooper, Robert E. Lee, Goss, Warren Lee, McKim, Randolph H., Stonewall Jackson, Rev. Henry M. Turner, Molly Moore, Miriam Davis Colt, James Cloyd Bowman, Ricardo Sanchez, Flannery Oconnor, Diana Chang, Garret Hongo, Colleen McElroy: Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes (Hardcover, 1999, Prentice Hall)

Review of 'Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes' on 'Goodreads'

Another story in which a man is tormented by his doppelgänger. Poe's take on this trope is quite similar to that of Dostoevsky's, both the original William Wilson and the original Golyadkin are being agonised by someone who walks, talks, and looks like them and both stories lead up to a climactic end. Despite their similarities, these stories each leave you a rather different feeling of discomfort than the other but are both worth reading.

5/5
The only downside to this story is its short length, other than that it's a fantastic read.


SPOILERS AHEAD:

I would like to add that between Dostoevsky's Double and Poe's William Wilson, I'm far fonder of the latter's ending:

"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."