Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of America's greatest and best-loved writers.

Known as the father of the detective story, Poe is perhaps most famous for his short stories particularly his shrewd mysteries and chilling, often grotesque tales of horror he was also an extremely accomplished poet and a tough literary critic.

Poe's life was not far removed from the drama of his fiction. Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by a foster family. As a young man, he developed problems with gambling, debts, and alcohol, and was even dismissed from the army.

His love life was marked by tragedy and heartbreak. Despite these difficulties, Poe produced many works now considered essential to the American literary canon.

Henry James was born in New York in 1843 and was educated in Europe and America. He left Harvard Law School in 1863, after a year's attendance, to concentrate on writing, and from 1869 he began to make prolonged visits to Europe, eventually settling in England in 1876.

His literary output was prodigious and of the highest quality: more than ten outstanding novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The American; countless novellas and short stories; as well as innumerable essays, letters, and other pieces of critical prose. Known by contemporary fellow novelists as 'the Master', James died in Kensington, London, in 1916.

William Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the son of a successful and popular painter. On leaving school, he worked in the office of a tea merchant in the Strand before reading law as a student at Lincoln's Inn. However his real passion was for writing and, in 1850, he published his first novel, Antonina.

In 1851, the same year that he was called to the bar, he met and established a lifelong friendship with Charles Dickens. While Collins' fame rests on his best known works, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, he wrote over thirty books, as well as numerous short stories, articles and plays. He was a hugely popular writer in his lifetime. An unconventional individual, he never married but established long-term liaisons with two separate partners. He died in 1889.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, where he wrote the bulk of his masterful tales of American colonial history.

His career as a novelist began with The Scarlet Letter (1850) and also includes The house of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun.

Arthur Machen (Arthur Llewelyn Jones), a Welsh author of supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction, was born on March 3, 1863. He grew up in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, and attended boarding school at Hereford Cathedral School.

He moved to London in 1881 and worked as a journalist, children's tutor, and publisher's clerk, finding time to write at night. By 1894, Machen had his first major success.

The Great God Pan was published by John Lane, and despite widespread criticism for its sexual and horrific content, it sold well and went into a second edition.

In the 1920s Machen's work became immensely popular in the United States, but Machen experienced increasing poverty; he was saved in 1931 by receiving a Civil List pension from the British government. Arthur Machen died on March 30, 1947.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and died in 1930. Within those years was crowded a variety of activity and creative work that made him an international figure and inspired the French to give him the epithet 'the good giant'.

He was the nephew of 'Dickie Doyle' the artist, and was educated at Stonyhurst, and later studied medicine at Edinburgh University, where the methods of diagnosis of one of the professors provided the idea for the methods of deduction used by Sherlock Holmes. He set up as a doctor at Southsea and it was while waiting for patients that he began to write.

His growing success as an author enabled him to give up his practice and turn his attention to other subjects. His greatest achievement was, of course, his creation of Sherlock Holmes, who soon attained international status and constantly distracted him from his other work; at one time Conan Doyle killed him but was obliged by public protest to restore him to life.

And in his creation of Dr Watson, Holmes's companion in adventure and chronicler, Conan Doyle produced not only a perfect foil for Holmes but also one of the most famous narrators in fiction.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, into a life of personal tragedy. In 1816, she married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and that summer traveled with him and a host of other Romantic intellectuals to Geneva.

Her greatest achievement was piecing together one of the most terrifying and renowned stories of all time: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Shelley conceived Frankenstein in, according to her, "a waking dream."

This vision was simply of a student kneeling before a corpse brought to life. Yet this tale of a mad creator and his abomination has inspired a multitude of storytellers and artists. She died on February 1, 1851.,

Born in Dublin, Ireland, on November 8, 1847, Bram Stoker published his first literary work, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a handbook in legal administration, in 1879.

Turning to fiction later in life, Stoker published his masterpiece, Dracula, in 1897. Deemed a classic horror novel not long after its release, Dracula has continued to garner acclaim for more than a century, inspiring the creation of hundreds of film, theatrical and literary adaptations.

In addition to Dracula, Stoker published more than a dozen novels before his death in 1912.

Richard Marsh (1857-1915) was the pseudonym of the British author born Richard Bernard Heldman. He is best known for his supernatural thriller The Beetle- A Mystery, published in the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula and initially even more popular.

Heldman was educated at Eton and Oxford University. Several of the prolific Marsh's novels were published posthumously.

Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish writer of gothic tales, mystery novels and ghost stories, most famous for his novel Uncle Silas. Carmilla was first published in 1872 and has served as an inspiration countless books, from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, and a slew of films such as Hammer Horror's Karnstein Trilogy.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and became the most popular novelist of the Victorian era.

A prolific writer, he published more than a dozen novels in his lifetime, including Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and Hard Times, most of which have been adapted many times over for radio, stage and screen.

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford (1717 97), was a writer, antiquarian and Whig politician best known for his letter-writing and for The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel.

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775 o1818) is best known for his Gothic novel The Monk, which caused a sensation and led to its author to being known as "Monk" Lewis for the remainder of his life.

Washington Irving was born in 1783 in New York City. In addition to writing fiction, Irving studied law, worked for his family's business in England and wrote essays for periodicals.

Some of his most famous tales, including Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, were first published under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon.

Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824) was an Irish playwright and novelist, born in Dublin. A contradictory figure, Maturin was both a friend of Lord Byron and a Protestant cleric.

His play Bertram so scandalised London that he was punished by the Church. He was also the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde, who renamed himself Melmoth while in exile as a tribute to his forebear. Melmoth the Wanderer is Maturin's best-known novel.

James Hogg (1770-1835) was born near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders. From a young age he was determined to be a poet like Burns. He became friends with Walter Scott and in 1810 he went to Edinburgh to seek a literary career.

His most well-known work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, made little impact when it first appeared (anonymously) in 1824, but has since won critical interest and attention as a classic of the Scottish canon. He continued to publish poetry and prose until his death in 1835.

Victor Hugo's classic novel of love & tragedy during the French Revolution is reborn in this fantastic new manga adaptation by Crystal S. Chan!

The gorgeous art of SunNeko Lee brings to life the tragic stories of Jean Valjean, Inspector Javert, and the beautiful Fantine, in this epic Manga Classics production of Les Miserables! All Manga Classic titles are produced with lesson plans, teaching guides and leveling for use in the classroom.

With each and every Manga Classic, it is our passion and hope that we help the reader connect with the story in a meaningful way. We also feel this is an exciting way to introduce these classic stories to a new reader who may then go back to read the original texts. We hope you enjoy our work.

Nikolai Gogol was a Russian writer and dramatist. He was born in the Ukraine in 1809.

The eldest of the famous sisters, Charlotte Bronte (1816–55) is best known as the author of Jane Eyre. The Brontes' first book - a collection of their poems, published under pseudonyms and at their own expense - met with scant notice.

Yet despite their remote Yorkshire residence, far from the London literary scene, and their tragically brief lives, all three achieved immortality with their individual novels. Charlotte's works are particularly prized for their moving and articulate depictions of the plight of educated but impoverished women in Victorian society.

Emily Bronte was born at Thornton, in Yorkshire, in 1818 and died in 1848. She was the younger sister of Charlotte Bronte and the fifth of six children.

Like her sister, Emily worked as a governess and later attended a private school in Brussels. Emily published poetry under a male pseudonym to avoid prejudice against female writers but Wuthering Heights was her only novel.

George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819. Her father was the land agent of Arbury Hall in Warwickshire, in the library of which Eliot embarked upon a brilliant self-education. She moved to London in 1850 and shone in its literary circles.

It was, however, her novels of English rural life that brought her fame, starting with Adam Bede, published under her new pen name in 1859, and reaching a zenith with Middlemarch in 1871. It is indicative of the respect and love that she inspired in her most devoted readers that Queen Victoria was one of them. She died in 1880.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied law but preferred writing and in 1881 was inspired by his stepson to write Treasure Island.

Other famous adventure stories followed including Kidnapped, as well as the famous collection of poems for children, A Child's Garden of Verses. Robert Louis Stevenson is buried on the island of Samoa.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) championed women's rights in her prolific fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In addition to writing books, she produced a magazine of essays, fiction, opinion pieces, and poetry that spoke to women's issues and social reform: seven volumes of The Forerunner were produced, running from 1909 to 1916.

John Meade Falkner (1858-1932) was an English novelist and poet, best known for his 1898 novel, Moonfleet. An extremely successful businessman as well, he became chairman of the arms manufacturer Armstrong Whitworth during World War I.

Herbert George "H. G." Wells (September 21, 1866-August 13, 1946) was an English author, best known for his work in the "speculative fiction" genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics, and social commentary.

Wells is sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction," along with Jules Verne. The War of the Worlds was written in the age of British colonialism, and Wells came up with the idea for the story while he and his brother were imagining what might happen if someone came to colonize England the way England had other countries.

William Wymark Jacobs (1863 1943) was a prolific short-story writer.

Known for his trademark wit even in the horror story 'The Monkey's Paw', for which he is best known Jacobs set most of his stories in the docks of East London, where he lived from a young age, as well as in Essex, where he moved in his middle age.

Gaston Leroux was born on 6 May 1868 in Paris and after school in Normandy, he returned to Paris to study law. His extreme gambling is well-documented after he squandered the millions he had inherited, narrowly escaping bankruptcy. He worked as a court reporter and theatre critic before landing a job as an international correspondent for Le Matin.

During this time Leroux travelled to Russia to experience and report on the Russian Revolution. In 1907 he gave up journalism to become a writer, and quickly found success with Le Mystore de la Chambre Jaune (1908). He became well-known for his popular and acclaimed crime and thriller novels, but Leroux also wrote poetry and short fiction.

His most famous work, Le FantPme de l'OpUra (The Phantom of the Opera), was inspired by a tour of the cellars at the Paris Opera, and published in 1911. The story has been adapted for film and, most notably, for Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running musical. Gaston Leroux died on 15 April 1927.