Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849. In his stormy forty years, which included a marriage to his cousin, fights with other writers, and legendary drinking binges, Poe lived in all the important literary centers of the northeastern United States: Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. He was a magazine editor, a poet, a short story writer, a critic, and a lecturer. He introduced the British horror story, or the Gothic genre, to American literature, along with the detective story, science fiction, and literary criticism. Poe became a key figure in the nineteenth-century flourishing of American letters and literature. Famed twentieth--century literary critic F.O. Matthiessen named this period the American Renaissance. He argued that nineteenth-century American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman crafted a distinctly American literature that attempts to escape from the long shadow of the British literary tradition. Matthiessen paid little attention to Edgar Allan Poe. Although he long had a reputation in Europe as one of America's most original writers, only in the latter half of the -twentieth century has Poe been viewed as a crucial contributor to the American Renaissance.
