Although he’s best known for his short horror stories, Poe was actually one of the most versatile and experimental writers of the 19th Century. He invented the detective story as we know it with The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which featured the original ‘armchair detective’, C. Auguste Dupin, who uses his genius and unusual powers of observation and deduction to solve crimes that baffle the police. Poe also wrote satires of social and literary trends, and hoaxes that, in some cases, anticipated science fiction - such as an account of a balloon voyage to the moon. He even wrote an adventure novel about a voyage to the South Pole, and a treatise on astrophysics, all while he worked as an editor, producing hundreds of pages of book reviews and literary theory.
An appreciation of Poe’s career wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging his haunting and hypnotic poetry. His best-known poems are ones focussing on grief, or in his words: "mournful and never-ending remembrance". The Raven, in which the speaker projects his grief onto a bird, who merely repeats a single sound, made Poe famous.
But despite his literary success, Poe lived in poverty throughout his career, and his personal life was often as dark as his writing. He was haunted by the loss of his mother and his wife, who both died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. Poe struggled with alcoholism, and frequently antagonised other popular writers. Much of his fame came from posthumous, and very loose, adaptations of his work.
And yet, if he could have known how much pleasure and inspiration his writing would bring to generations of readers and writers alike, perhaps it may have brought a smile to that famously brooding visage.
