He is credited not only with being the master of horror, but also with inventing detective fiction, and possibly science fiction as well. The French were the first to love Poe, and many French writers, including Jules Verne, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé, were heavily influenced by him. Not surprisingly, Poe also influenced Sherlock Holmes-creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, suspense-meister Alfred Hitchcock, weird-fiction-superstar H.P. Lovecraft, Gothic virtuosos William Faulkner and Joyce Carol Oates, contemporary horror maestros Clive Barker and Steven King, and Russian kings-of-creepy Feodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov. Also on the list of influenced are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Charles Dickens. Even Sylvester Stallone is influenced by Poe and is making a movie about him. The list goes on and on, and is expanding even as we speak! For more on Poe's almost diabolic influence, click here.

So, it's pretty obvious that Poe is everywhere. So how did he become so powerful? Who or what created this loveable monster? What were his influences? It might have begun in the home of foster-father John Allan, with the stories Poe heard from "house slaves," "skippers and sea merchants". As his fancy linguistic footwork attests, he was also deeply interested in languages, making light work of "Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian". While Poe probably didn't read German in the original, German writers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Immanuel Kant really rocked his socks. Charles Dickens had a major impact on Poe as did Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron.

Poe's influences don't end with storytellers, poets and philosophers. He was a fan of classical music, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Joseph Haydn. But, perhaps his biggest influence was cryptography. Cryptography isn't the science of crypts, but (as you probably know) the science of breaking and creating codes. As Poe himself stated, his stories are written in codes, which he challenged readers to decipher. This is probably a big part of why he's so famous today — nobody can completely figure him out, or his work, though few readers can resist trying. So, bust out that "Cask of Amontillado" and pour one out for the master. We'd make a toast, but we don't want to upset the infamous Poe Toaster.