This course focuses on the considerable influence Edgar Allan Poe's works have had on other writers. Authors as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Vladimir Nabokov, Shirley Jackson, Ralph Ellison, and Mat Johnson have used Poe's stories as departure points for their own work. We shall then explore how and why Poe's stories have been so important for authors, despite the fact that his reputation as a great American writer, unlike Hawthorne's and Melville's, for example, is a relatively recent phenomenon.