Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American writer of stories, poems and criticism. Orphaned young and raised by a Richmond merchant who later disowned him, he spent his adult life as a magazine editor in poverty. In little more than a decade he wrote the tales collected in the two volumes on Vinteuil, including The Fall of the House of Usher and The Murders in the Rue Morgue, generally regarded as the first detective story, and the poem The Raven, which made him briefly famous in 1845. He died in Baltimore at forty in circumstances never explained. His reputation in France, through Baudelaire's translations, long exceeded his standing in America.