Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (19 January 1809 - 7 October 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. He is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
==Influence On Lovecraft==
H. P. Lovecraft was famously inspired by Poe's morbid literature. In Lovecraft's essays, poems and letters, Poe is mentioned multiple times. Lovecraft wrote "When I write stories, Edgar Allan Poe is my model" and "But Poe was my God of Fiction" in his letters to Rheinhart Kleiner.
The Shoggoth's cry of "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" from At the Mountains of Madness is a direct reference to Poe's only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, where the same cry is said by the natives and the birds at the end of the novel. Both of these works are also thematically similar.
Along with Arthur Gordon Pym, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia cites "Berenice", "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" as having particularly influenced Lovecraft.An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)", by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Hippocampus Press, 2004). Critic Bobby Derie also points to "The Fall of the House of Usher", and adds "Ligeia" as another influential Poe story.Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, by Bobby Derie (Hippocampus Press, 2015)
==External Links==
*Edgar Allan Poe at Wikipedia
==References==
Category:Deceased (Real World)
Category:Lovecraft's Inspirations (authors)