The Raven

Edgar Allen Poe was central to the American romantic movement in literature, as both a poet and a writer of fiction. He was one of the inventors of the horror story and of the mystery story. "The Raven," written in 1845, was his most successful poem. His father abandoned his family at the time of his birth, and his mother died when he was one year old: his difficult childhood and the financial difficulties that came from supporting himself purely by writing undoubtedly contributed to the ov...