Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of the most significant and singular writers in the history of American letters. He was a poet, a pioneer of science fiction, the father of the detective story, and a master of the macabre whom Nobel-prize winner Toni Morrison identified as a key to America's conflicted literary conscience. He died mysteriously in Baltimore at the age of forty, leaving behind a body of work that has influenced writers and artists such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Paul Klee, H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen King, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, and every crime writer to this day.
Ulrich Baer holds a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale. A widely published author, he is University Professor at New York University, and has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Alexander von Humboldt fellowships. He has written numerous books on poetry, photography and cultural politics, and edited and translated Rainer Maria Rilke's The Dark Interval, Letters on Life, and Letters to a Young Poet. He hosts leading writers and artists to talk about big ideas and great books on the Think About It podcast. In the Warbler Press Contemplations series, he has published: Nietzsche, Rilke, Dickinson, Wilde, and Shakespeare on Love.
