Edgar Allan Poe

Born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, Edgar Allan Poe was left an orphan when only two. He was then raised by a Richmond merchant named John Allan, whose name Poe later adopted as middle name. The loss of his brother, his sister becoming insane, gambling debts at university, abuse of alcohol, and finally the death of his wife, have inevitably lead to Poe’s reserved character and profound melancholy. After an attempt at suicide in 1848, he died in Baltimore in 1849 after days of excessive drink.

Today, Poe is best known for his stories of mystery and suspense, such as The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Pit and the Pendulum or The Tell-Tale Heart. But above all, Poe was a poet, whose genius already formed itself at the age of five, when one of his teachers described him as "a born poet". Probably, his best known poems are Annabel Lee (1849) and The Raven (1845), the latter having brought him national fame. Both poems deal with Poe’s favourite theme: the death of a beautiful woman.

In Annabel Lee, an ode to his late wife, the poet bemoans the death of the maiden Annabel Lee, “in a kingdom by the sea”. While in The Raven he is haunted by the “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore“, who tells him that he will see his beloved one, nevermore. 
For some of Poe’s works read:

Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales. Penguin Popular Classics, 2007. 405 pages.
Edgar Allan Poe: Spirits Of The Dead - Tales and Poems. Penguin Popular Classics, 1997. 288 pages.