Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of -The Red Mask of Death, - -The Black Cat, - and -The Murders of the Rue Morgue, - Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. -The Raven- and -The Tell-Tale Heart- have been read as signs of his personal obsessions, and -The Fall of the House of Usher- and -The Descent into the Maelstrom- as symptoms of his own mental collapse. Biographers have seldom resisted the opportunities to confuse the pathologies in the stories with the events in Poe's...