Edgar Allan Poe, (1809-1849) is America’s first truly great imaginative writer, unequalled in his genre of Horror and Suspense. He virtually invented the detective story and the idea of putting the center of attention on the process of unraveling a crime rather than focusing on the criminal or the act. He was famous for writing tales told by “non-responsible narrators” whose self-deluding ways force the reader into an active role in cracking the mystery. 

Graham's magazine, February, 1854 declared Poe's power and genius to display: "a management of the supernatural never attained or approached by any other writer, making it appear positively natural, mysticism so regulated as to shock no sense of the rational, a horror, a gloom, a melancholy and an awful creed or want of creed which we fear were all but too real."

AND From his obituary published in the New York Daily tribune: "Literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars..." [His works] "... illustrate a morbid sensitiveness of feeling, a shadowy and gloomy imagination.... His imagery was from the worlds which no mortal can see but  with the vision of genius. ...in forms of gloomiest and ghastliest grandeur... He was at all times a dreamer - dwelling in ideal realms - in Heaven or Hell - peopled with creatures and the accidents if his brain."