Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Here we find a collection of four of Edgar Allen Poe’s most beloved and most chilling short stories: The Black Cat, The Tell Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death and the Fall of the House of Usher. Poe is praised as a poet, science fiction and horror short story writer, and the father of the modern detective story. Walt Whitman, in his essay titled “Edgar Poe’s Significance” wrote; Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page. … There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems.