Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American poet, short story writer, editor and critic and one of the leaders of the American Romantics. He is best known for his tales of the macabre and his poems, as well as being one of the early practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of Gothic and Detective fiction (Crime fiction) in the United States.

Adaptations

• Several of Poe's works were made into movies, notably a series of movies directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. The 1993 film The Mummy Lives, starring Tony Curtis, screenplay by Nelson Gidding, was suggested by Poe's Some Words with a Mummy (1845).
• Author Ray Bradbury is a great admirer of Poe, and has either featured Poe as a character or alluded to Poe's stories in many of his works.
• In 1976, The Alan Parsons Project produced a record album entitled Tales of Mystery and Imagination, based on several of Poe's tales. The album also features Orson Welles as the narrator in the instrumental opening track Dream within a dream. More recently, Eric Woolfson has written and produced a stage musical entitled Poe: More Tales of Mystery and Imagination that has run in England.
• Robert R. McCammon wrote Ushers Passing, a sequel to Fall of the House of Usher, published in 1984
• Writer Stephen Marlowe adapted the strange details of Poe's death into his 1995 novel The Lighthouse at the End of the World.
• In 1995 several of Poe's stories were combined to make an interactive novel stylised as a video game called The Dark Eye.
• A double-CD organized by Hal Willner, "Closed On Account of Rabies" with poems and tales of Poe performed by artists as diverse as Christopher Walken, Marianne Faithfull, Iggy Pop and Jeff Buckley was issued in 1997.
• In 2003, Lou Reed released a double-CD set titled "The Raven" after Poe's poem.
• Peter Hammill has written and recorded an operatic version of "The Fall of the House of Usher."
• Elysian Fields has been known to perform some of his work in song form.
• Heavy metal band Iron Maiden recorded a song titled "Murders in the Rue Morgue" for their second album, "Killers."
• Heavy metal band Grave Digger released an album in 2001 entitled "The Grave Digger". All twelve songs are based fully on Poe's works.
• The song "Tomb of Ligeiau" by the band Team Sleep is based on Poe's story Ligeia.
• German based band Diorama recorded a song Her Liquid Arms in 2001, for the same album, which starts with a spoken sample of the end of The Tell-Tale Heart