This paper surveys the grotesque which takes a principal position in the American literature since the nineteenth to the present. It outlines the evolution of grotesque from art to literary form, and its meaning that is combined from different critical works. Moreover, it describes the grotesque from the gothic to the textual analysis of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque which is a short fiction by Edgar Allen Poe as a key literary writer in the ground of the grotesque. He appears as a groundbreaking writer in the nineteenth century American literature and a fruitful influence on his followers. His grotesques are not as common as his gothic stories because the former ones are of a humorous and unusual character when compared to his other stories. In fact, his grotesques fall into the territory of satirical grotesques.