What was Edgar Allan Poe's success in American Literature?

Question

Was it because he began the whole mystery genre? or what?

Answer 1

The Raven and Other Poems (1845) won him fame as a poet both at home and abroad. In 1846 he moved to the Fordham cottage (now a museum) and there wrote "The Literati of New York City" for Godey's Lady's Book

Poe influenced such diverse authors as Swinburne, Tennyson, Dostoyevsky, Conan Doyle, and the French symbolists.

Poe was a complex person, tormented and alcoholic yet also considerate and humorous, a good friend, and an affectionate husband. Indeed, his painful life, his neurotic attraction to intense beauty, violent horror, and death, and his sense of the world of dreams contributed to his greatness as a writer. Such compelling stories as "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" involve the reader in a universe that is at once beautiful and grotesque, real and fantastic.

Poe wrote prolifically, but it was really The Raven that won his acclaim as an American author. Through the attention received by the poem, his other works were brought to the forefront and recognized as the works of genius they are.

Answer 2

Yes, for one. He wrote the first American detective story and was really the first to be successful at the genre. He wasn't the abslute first to write mysteries and detective stories, but he was the most successful. He was a master of the short story.

Answer 3

He married his 13-year-old cousin when he was 26. She later died from tuberculosis.

Answer 4

perhaps he started the mystery/crime genre with his story on the murder of marie roget

http://www.4literature.net/Edgar_Allan_Poe/Mystery_of_Marie_Roget/