Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was born in Baltimore, where in the 1830s he began an unsettled career in magazine editing and writing. Over the next two decades, heavy drinking and frequent quarrels with his employers lost him a number of jobs. Poe meanwhile lived in Richmond, New York, Philadelphia, New York again, then Richmond again, and finally Baltimore, where he died at age 40. Despite his stormy relations with magazine publishers, he produced a steady output of widely read poems, stories, and critical reviews that often brought success to the magazines where he worked. Among Poe’s best known poems are “Lenore” (1843), “The Raven” (1845), “Annabel Lee” (1848), and “The Bells” (1849); his short stories include “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846; also in Literature and its Times). Like such works, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” conveys an atmosphere of mystery, gloom, and foreboding, and dramatizes death, loss, and grotesque violence. Unlike them, however, it is credited with introducing an entirely new figure into world literature: the investigator whose powers of detection can be used to combat—or at least illuminate—those dark forces.
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