The Raven / The Masque of the Red Death / The Cask of Amontillado

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849), a short story writer and poet, was master of the macabre and one of America's great literary geniuses. His collection of poems and short stories not only helped to define the horror genre, but would influence subsequent strains of mystery, crime fiction, and sci-fi.He is credited with inventing the detective fiction genre with the 1841 publication of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Poe's poem "The Raven," which was published in 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror, won Poe wide critical and popular praise, and is one of the America's most famous literary works.

The narrator of the poem has lost his one and only love, Lenore, and is soon visited by a raven that repeatedly cries out "Nevermore." With beautiful and haunting language, musicality, and a supernatural atmosphere, Poe's work follows the speaker's spiral into madness.