Edgar Allan Poe

Poe greatly admired Dickens, and managed to meet him on an American tour; Dickens returned the admiration, while his pet raven seemingly inspired Poe to write one of his best-known works. Hawthorne was a correspondent, but also a great rival. Poe wangled from Irving (whom he didn’t really respect) his endorsement for a volume of stories, and publicly abused the long-suffering Longfellow, a correspondent though they never met face-to-face. The story that Poe visited France and stayed with Alexandre Dumas, bearing a letter of introduction from James Fenimore Cooper, is widely accepted as fictional.