Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of the most significant and singular writers in the history of American letters. He was a poet, a pioneer of science fiction, the father of the detective story, and a master of the macabre whom Nobel-prize winner Toni Morrison identified as a key to America's conflicted literary conscience. He died mysteriously in Baltimore at the age of forty, leaving behind a body of work that has influenced writers and artists such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Paul Klee, H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen King, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, and every crime writer to this day.