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Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, USA, in 1809. Poe, short story writer, editor and critic, he is best known for his macabre tales and as the progenitor of the detective story. He died in 1849, in mysterious circumstances, at the age of forty.
Poe's work as a whole is a series of haunting improvisations on themes from the macabre that are hard to categorise, dazzlingly original and posthumously influential on an extraordinary range of writers from Baudelaire and RL Stevenson to Yeats, Wilde and Borges—Observer His work continues to enthral. His greatest tales (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum) radiate a dark humour and mockery that strike an oddly modern note—Sunday Times If genius is an exceptional capacity for imaginative creation, Poe had it in spades—Daily Mail His reputation as a master of the grotesque and macabre has veiled the real cause of his fame: an astonishing mastery of language and literary technique which made Arthur Ransome, himself no mean story technician and a considerable literary critic, liken his stories to rare coloured goblets or fantastic metalwork—Independent
