Edgar Allan Poe

Author profile

born

January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, The United States

died

October 07, 1849

gender

male

website

http://www.poemuseum.org

genre

Horror, Poetry

About this author

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The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the biz...more The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...(less)

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Books by Edgar Allan Poe

Average rating: 4.14 · 212,323 ratings · 4,729 reviews · 809 distinct works

	The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings 4.07 avg rating — 54,332 ratings — published 1843 — 21 editions	My rating:
	Complete Stories and Poems 4.35 avg rating — 53,618 ratings — published 1849 — 24 editions	My rating:
	The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Marlowe (Editor) 4.06 avg rating — 13,711 ratings — published 1960 — 81 editions	My rating:
	Essential Tales and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe, Benjamin F. Fisher (Editor) 4.29 avg rating — 10,671 ratings — published 1989 — 3 editions	My rating:
	The Cask of Amontillado 3.99 avg rating — 11,206 ratings — published 1846 — 25 editions	My rating:
	The Raven and Other Poems 4.20 avg rating — 9,624 ratings — published 1845 — 27 editions	My rating:
	The Pit and the Pendulum 4.08 avg rating — 5,391 ratings — published 1948 — 20 editions	My rating:
	The Masque of the Red Death 4.01 avg rating — 5,139 ratings — published 1842 — 34 editions	My rating:
	The Fall of the House of Usher 3.82 avg rating — 4,670 ratings — published 1839 — 55 editions	My rating:
	The Pit and the Pendulum 3.90 avg rating — 4,147 ratings — published 1842 — 36 editions	My rating:

More books by Edgar Allan Poe…

Series by Edgar Allan Poe

C. Auguste Dupin (3 books)
by Edgar Allan Poe

3.79 avg rating — 5,021 ratings

The Bloomsbury Phantastics (1 book)
by Edgar Allan Poe, Gary Kelley

4.20 avg rating — 1,370 ratings

Quotes by Edgar Allan Poe

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

tags: insanity , sanity

4,046 people liked it

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

tags: day , dreaming , dreams , night

3,560 people liked it

“We loved with a love that was more than love.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

tags: logic , love

2,094 people liked it

See all Edgar Allan Poe's quotes »

Polls

Vote for your Favourite Horror Writer.

Stephen King

26 votes, 38.2%

Edgar Allan Poe

25 votes, 36.8%

Dean Koontz

11 votes, 16.2%

H.P. Lovecraft

4 votes, 5.9%

Clive Barker

2 votes, 2.9%

Richard Matheson

0 votes, 0.0%

Robert Bloch

0 votes, 0.0%

68 total votes

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