"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843.

The pendulum is withdrawn into the ceiling, and the walls become red-hot and start to move inwards, forcing him slowly toward the center of the room and into the pit.

"The Pit and the Pendulum" was included in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843, edited by Eliza Leslie and published by Carey & Hart.

[4] However, there is an implicit irony in the reference to the black-robed judges having lips "whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words", which shows that he has survived and is writing the story after the events.

[6] The "realism" of the story is enhanced through Poe's focus on reporting sensations: the dungeon is airless and unlit, the narrator is subject to thirst and starvation, he is swarmed by rats, the razor-sharp pendulum threatens to slice into him and the closing walls are red-hot.

Poe may have been inspired to focus on the purposeful impersonal torture in part by Juan Antonio Llorente's History of the Spanish Inquisition, first published in 1817.

In the Koran itself, in Sura (Chapter) 85, "The Celestial Signs", a passage reads: "...cursed were the contrivers of the pit, of fire supplied with the fuel... and they afflicted them for no other reason, but because they believed in the mighty, the glorious God.

[10][11][12] Poe makes no attempt to describe accurately the operations of the Spanish Inquisition, and takes considerable dramatic license with the broader history premised in this story.

The rescuers are led by Napoleon's General Lasalle (who was not, however, in command of the French occupation of Toledo) and this places the action during the Peninsular War (1808–14), centuries after the height of the Spanish Inquisition.

The original source of the pendulum torture method is one paragraph in the preface of the 1826 book The history of the Inquisition of Spain by the Spanish priest, historian and activist Juan Antonio Llorente,[13] relating a second-hand account by a single prisoner released from the Inquisition's Madrid dungeon in 1820, who purportedly described the pendulum torture method.

Poe places a Latin epigraph before the story, describing it as "a quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club House at Paris".