Edgar Allan Poe

Unquestionably one of America’s major writers, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was far ahead of his time in his vision of a special area of human experience—the “inner world” of dream, hallucination, and imagination. He wrote fiction, poetry, and criticism and was a magazine editor. More than a century after his death, Poe continued to inspire many prominent authors. In these years, his work garnered ever-mounting esteem. In 2009, a copy of his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poem, sold at auction for $662,500, a record amount.

Poe was best known to his own generation as an editor and critic; his poems and short stories commanded only a small audience. But to some extent in his poems, and to an impressive...