Short Stories: The Nostalgia Collection

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809. His parents, both touring actors, died before he was three. He was raised by John Allan, a prosperous Virginian merchant. Poe published his first volume of poetry while still a teenager. He worked as an editor for magazines in Philadelphia, Richmond and New York, and achieved respect as a literary critic. It was only with the publication of The Raven and other Poems in 1845 that he achieved national fame as a writer. Poe died in mysterious circumstances in 1849.

Mark Twain, who was born Samuel L. Clemens in Missouri in 1835, wrote some of the most enduring works of literature of American fiction, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He died in 1910.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859. He trained to be a doctor at Edinburgh University and eventually set up a medical practice in Southsea. During the quiet periods between patients, he turned his hand to writing, producing historical novels such as Micah Clarke and adventure yarns including The Lost World, as well as four novels and fifty-six stories involving his most celebrated creations, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Doyle was knighted in 1902. In later life he devoted much of his time to his belief in Spiritualism, using his writing and celebrity as a means of providing funds to support activities in this field. He died in 1930.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University in 1913, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and he quickly became a central figure in the American expatriate circle in Paris that included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four.