Edgar Allan Poe is a master of the macabre he wrote horror he wrote poetry criticism fiction mystery he was a master of suspense Edgar Allen Poe called by many the father of the detective story was born on January 19 1809 in Boston Massachusetts when Poe is two years old his mother passed away and his father had already abandoned the family he was taken in as a foster child by the Allen family he was writing poetry from about the time that he was 13 he kept writing all the time he worked very very hard at its writing I wrote constantly in 1826 Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia he went into debt he gambled try to pay off those debts and found himself in even greater debt and ultimately had to withdraw from the University in 1830 Poe enrolled at West Point after West Point Poe turned to writing full-time and lived in a number of East Coast cities before settling down in Richmond Virginia Edgar Allen Poe secretly married his 13 year old cousin and then in 1836 publicly married her in a more open ceremony he loved her very very much they lived together always until around she died of tuberculosis when she was gets around 20 Poe's primary occupation as a writer was as a literary critic he worked at several newspapers and literary magazines and he had quite a reputation for being a harsh critic one of his editors called him the tomahawk man during his lifetime he barely made a living from his writing Howe published some of his most famous short stories in his 1840 collection tales of the grotesque and arabesque he wrote some of his stories using the first-person and talking about the use of opium so people assumed that he dabbled in drugs the stories were so creepy they were ghost stories taken to such a brilliant extreme that people thought he had to be a little strange himself Poe invented detective fiction when he wrote the murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 murders in the Rue Morgue really deserves to be called the first detective story it started the whole tradition of detective fiction the Raven which was published in 1845 was his huge breakthrough it became a big bestseller post career very much went up and down until he really at the Raven and that poem was known by you know it seems everyone in the world had an enormous press on October 7th 18-49 Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of 40 under mysterious circumstances Poe's death may be one of the most bizarre things about his life he left Virginia on his way to New York disappeared a week later he was found on the streets of Baltimore we don't have a single piece of information about what he was doing at the end of that week he was found in a tavern ill drunk and was taken to a hospital it turned out he was wearing clothes that didn't belong to him and a couple of days later he died in a delirium nobody knows exactly what killed him Edgar Allan Poe's legacy in American literature is very detectable in all of the mystery dramas and stories we have and all the kind of horror and vampire work that we see that there is that trace of the sort of horror and mystery that Poe really was able to harness in his writing Poe's an American icon I think he's more than a writer even today more than 150 years after he died everybody loves Edgar Allen Poe you