"The Raven" is a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and among his works it remains one of the most frequently cited. Its dark atmosphere draws on the Gothic and Romantic sensibilities that ran through much of what Poe produced across his career, placing the poem at the center of his literary identity.

Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, and was educated at the University of Virginia and the United States Military Academy. He worked as a writer, poet, journalist, editor, and literary critic, producing in English a body of work that moved across short fiction, poetry, and criticism. His short stories drew on the conventions of Gothic literature — as in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" — while "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Gold-Bug" placed him among the practitioners of detective fiction. The range of his output, spanning forms and genres, reflected the Romanticism movement with which he was associated throughout his career.

Poe died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. His work in detective fiction, represented by "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," sits alongside his Gothic tales and his poetry as the three broad currents of a writing life conducted entirely in English. "The Gold-Bug" stands as another example of his engagement with that genre, and together these works illustrate the breadth of what he produced between his birth in 1809 and his death four decades later in Baltimore.