On January 19, 1809, poet Edgar Allan Poe was born, a man who would leave an undeniable and indelible mark on universal literature, both through his short-stories and his works as a literary critic.

Poe is best known for his stories that combine mystery with macabre, which still manage to give readers goosebumps, and he is considered the father of the detective-fiction genre.

All throughout his short life-he only lived to be forty years old-Edgar Allan Poe was considered a very controversial figure, a common belief which followed him after his death as well, mainly stemming from his alcohol and drug abuse.

At the age of 26, Poe married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin, who died of tuberculosis twelve years later.

In 1845, he published his poem „The Raven,” which has remained his best known work and also an ars poetica that offers the guidelines to a perfectly rationally constructed poem. Poe did not believe in being inspired as a writer, considering that poems stem from reason and that a beautiful work could and should  be the result of a mathematical, thus purely rational, mentally developed algorithm.

Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore, the cause of his death remaining unknown, although it was attributed to several agents including alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide and tuberculosis.

Among his most renowned works are „The Fall of the House of Usher,” „The Mask of the Red Death,” „The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” „Berenice” and „The Tell-Tale Heart.”