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Home / People / Edgar Allan Poe

Historical person

Edgar Allan Poe

1809–1849

Edgar Poe was born in Boston in 1809 and was orphaned while still a child. He was taken into the Richmond household of John and Frances Allan and spent part of his childhood in Britain, attending schools in Scotland and the London area between 1815 and 1820.

He later adopted Allan as a middle name, although John Allan never formally adopted him. Poe became known for poems and stories including The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. His work helped develop Gothic fiction, psychological horror and the modern detective story.

In Barbara Hambly’s Good Man Friday, January receives help from a young Edgar Allan Poe and encounters politicians including John Quincy Adams, but his own position remains dangerous in a city where free Black people can be abducted and sold. In Andrew Taylor’s The American Boy, Thomas Shield becomes a master at a school near London and is assigned to two boys: the sensitive Charles Frant and his American companion, Edgar Allan Poe.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Edgar Allan Poe (1 series)

Benjamin January Mysteries in Order

by Barbara Hambly 21 books 4.2(19,232)

Benjamin January is a free man of colour, a trained surgeon and a professional musician living in New Orleans during the decades before the American Civil War. His investigations move through Creole drawing rooms, music halls, hospitals, plantations, riverboats and slave quarters, where formal law is shaped by…

All books in this series

Standalone books

Standalone books featuring Edgar Allan Poe (1 book)