Edgar Allan Poe

Ah, dream too bright to last!
⁠Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!

“To One in Paradise” (1843)

Poe (Wikipedia) worked at the birth of detective fiction, helped bring Romanticism to the USA and wrote early efforts toward science fiction as a genre, but he also loved banter, Gothic horror, fabulism, and, above all, the tragic death of beautiful women. His fans have debated how haunted he really was by the deaths of people around him, including his parents and his wife, a cousin who was 13 when they married and who died just two years before the alcoholic Poe himself.

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