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This first volume of the 'Raven Edition' of Poe's works opens with James Russell Lowell's account of his life and N. P. Willis's notice of his death, and…
This first volume of the 'Raven Edition' of Poe's works opens with James Russell Lowell's account of his life and N. P. Willis's notice of his death, and then gathers some of his most inventive tales. 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', in which the detective Auguste Dupin solves a double murder in a locked room in Paris, is often called the first modern detective story, and Dupin returns in 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt'. 'The Gold-Bug' turns on a secret code and Captain Kidd's buried treasure, and 'The Balloon-Hoax' was printed in a New York newspaper in 1844 as a true report of a crossing of the Atlantic by balloon.
Context and significance
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) invented the detective story and shaped science fiction and horror, and Conan Doyle acknowledged his debt to Dupin when he created Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. His great horror tales are collected in Volume 2.
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was born in Boston to travelling actors and orphaned before he was three. Raised by a Richmond merchant who later disowned him, he lived by his pen as a poet, critic and magazine editor, always short of money. His young wife Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847, and two years later Poe was found delirious in Baltimore and died days later, in circumstances that are still a mystery.
He made the short story an art of total effect, wrote tales of terror such as The Fall of the House of Usher, invented the detective story with 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and wrote 'The Raven', one of the most famous poems in English. French poets led by Baudelaire honoured him before America did.