Edgar Poe was born on January 19,1809 to Eliza and David Poe, Jr. in Boston. Shortly after moving the family from Boston to New York, David abandoned them. 2 years later, Eliza died leaving behind three orphaned children. Poe, a southerner, shares with Melville a darkly metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, and burlesque. He refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today. Poe's short and tragic life was plagued with insecurity. His strange marriage in 1835 to his first cousin Virginia Clemm, who was not yet 14, has been interpreted as an attempt to find the stable family life he lacked.

Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty, and his writing is often exotic. His stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats (Poe, like many other southerners, cherished an aristocratic ideal). These gloomy characters never seem to work or socialize; instead they bury themselves in dark, moldering castles symbolically decorated with bizarre rugs and draperies that hide the real world of sun, windows, walls, and floors. The hidden rooms reveal ancient libraries, strange art works, and eclectic oriental objects. The aristocrats play musical instruments or read ancient books while they brood on tragedies, often the deaths of loved ones. Themes of death-in-life, especially being buried alive or returning like a vampire from the grave, appear in many of his works, including "The Premature Burial," "Ligeia," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe's twilight realm between life and death and his gaudy, Gothic settings are not merely decorative. They reflect the over-civilized yet deathly interior of his characters disturbed psyches. They are symbolic expressions of the unconscious, and thus are central to his art.

Poe's verse, like that of many Southerners, was very musical and strictly metrical. His best-known poem, in his own lifetime and today, is "The Raven" (1845). In this eerie poem, the haunted, sleepless narrator, who has been reading and mourning the death of his "lost Lenore" at midnight, is visited by a raven (a bird that eats dead flesh, hence a symbol of death) who perches above his door and ominously repeats the poem's famous refrain, "nevermore."

He died in Baltimore, a delirium of "acute congestion of the brain", and was buried near his grandfather in the Presbyterian cemetery. There are a few different theories as to the cause of Poe’s death. Dr. J Evans Snodgrass, who was the physician on when Edgar was brought in , believes he died from complications of alcoholism. Dr John Moran, Poe’s own physician, believes he was set upon by thugs and beaten. Dr R. Michael Benitez has yet another theory. He has reviewed the evidence and published his findings in the September issue of the Maryland Medical Journal. "No one can say conclusively that Poe died of rabies, since there was no autopsy after his death." (Gugliotta) "But the historical accounts of Poe’s condition in the hospital a few days before his death point to a strong possibility that he had rabies." (Gugliotta) As with many things about Poe perhaps we’ll never know the full truth.