Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. He was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. He is best known for his dark and eerie tales filled with mysteries. He is considered the creator of the crime genre in literature with the novel "Murder on Morgue Street" and stories such as "The Golden Beetle", "The Stolen Letter" and others. His work is a step towards the advent of science fiction as a genre. His writing career began with the small collection of poems "Tamerlan and other poems" (1827), signed anonymously - "by a resident of Boston". He then switched his focus from poetry to prose and spent the next few years working for literary magazines and newspapers. In January 1845, the poem "The Raven" brought him enormous success. On October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of 40 in Baltimore. The cause of his death remains unclear to this day, but the true causes of his early demise are said to be excessive alcohol and drug use. Ridiculousness brought to the grotesque, terrible descriptions in which there is a grain of horror, wit proved to the point of farce, the always turned into the strange and mysterious - in short, Edgar Allan By defining his creative method, or precisely by the requirements that stories must meet and his novels. His work worries to this day and raises a number of questions. How "seriously" should it be read? Is the author a martyr to his unbridled imagination? Or is he the father of American Gothic kitsch? Or maybe he's just a prankster? An expression of the subconscious clothed in allegory? In the compact volume of the Trud Book Publishing House, 14 of Poe's stories are included in the brilliant translations of Boris Damyanov and Svetla Hristova.