Peter Ackroyd, whose pen includes a number of biographies of his great compatriots - Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, Turner - it is no coincidence that he included in this series the biography of Edgar Allan Poe. In England, Poe was recognized much earlier and understood much more deeply than in America. Thomas Hardy believed that Poe was “the first to fully realize the possibilities of the English language,” and Yeats had no doubt that Poe was “the greatest of American poets.” Edgar Allan Poe played a huge role in the development of European literature, becoming the forerunner of symbolism and surrealism, not to mention the fact that he laid the foundations for such popular modern genres as science fiction and detective fiction.