Originator of the modern detective story and creator of supremely atmospheric tales of horror, Edgar Allan Poe was an American short-story writer, poet, critic and editor who is still celebrated for his artistic fascination with mystery and the macabre. He was born in Boston in 1809, the son of actors and when his mother died in 1811, 
John Allan, a merchant in Richmond, brought him up. Given a classical education in Scotland and England, his guardian refused to finance his university education due to Poe’s heavy gambling losses. At one time, he joined the army to avoid poverty but was later expelled. Living and working as a newspaper editor in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York City though barely at subsistence level, he also published verse influenced by Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley and numerous short stories. Once dismissed from an editorial post due to intoxication, he had frequent bouts of alcoholism. After one such heavy drinking spree, he died in Baltimore in 1849.
Poe exerted an influence on later writers; his novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), which like many of his stories combined fact with imagination, was an inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick. His fiction featuring the detective Dupin, including The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) are puzzling mysteries that developed the genre of the detective story. The women in his life inspired him (“To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” “Eulalie,” “To One in Paradise”) and he wrote idealistic hymns to beauty and love (“Ligeia” and “Eleonora.”) However, Gothic Romanticism heavily influenced him and much of his work is concerned with terror and sadness. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839) include “William Wilson” (where a man is confronted with his doppelganger) and the gothic romance “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Both are tales of supernatural horror; in the latter the narrator visits his childhood companion Roderick Usher in his crumbling mansion, in the final stages of mental and physical weakness. Roderick’s sister is buried alive and arises to carry her brother to his death. "The Raven" (1845) became one of the best-known American poems and brought him fame and literary importance as well as resulting in literary feuds and scandals.
With typically gothic sensibilities, Poe’s work seeks to evade common experience through the exploration of the gruesome, fearful and psychologically morbid in his tales of death, crime, bitter endurance and fatality. Combining fantasy with intricate problems of logic and close observation to detail, his work intrigued later writers. Freudian critics have analysed the pathological elements in his work, with hints of necrophilia in “Annabel Lee”, indulgent sadism in “The Pit and the Pendulum” and motiveless obsession in “The Cask of Amontillado”.