Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, editor poet and literary critic, who is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as also an innovator in the genre of science fiction. Poe was the first well-known American writer to try to live by writing alone, albeit without much initial financial success. He was quite taken with the ideas of human psychology, death, premature burial, reanimation of the dead, and mourning, which were recurring themes in his works. Some of his best-known stories are brought together in this collection. `The Purloined Letter’ and `The Fall of the House of Usher’ among others. Poe continues to engage and thrill generations of readers, even years after his time, through his tales of horror, the Gothic, mystery and the macabre.