Who wrote the poem The Raven?

Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1845, and it made him instantly famous and almost no money - he was paid around nine dollars for it. It was reprinted everywhere without payment, parodied constantly, and he was pointed at in the street; he died four years later, destitute, at forty.

He later wrote an essay claiming to explain exactly how he had composed it, working backwards from the effect he wanted - choosing the length, the tone of melancholy, the refrain, and then the word nevermore for its long vowel sounds, and only then working out what creature could plausibly repeat it. Whether that account is honest or a piece of retrospective showmanship is argued about; either way it is one of the first attempts by a writer to describe composition as engineering.

Poe also more or less invented the detective story - his Dupin stories predate Sherlock Holmes by decades and established the brilliant amateur, the admiring narrator and the locked room. The circumstances of his death remain unexplained: he was found delirious in Baltimore in someone else's clothes, could not account for himself, and died days later. His obituary was written by a literary enemy who forged letters to blacken him, and that portrait shaped his reputation for a century.