Lovecraft dates his first work of prose fiction to 1897, and elsewhere identifies it as ‘The Noble Eavesdropper’, about which all we know is that it concerned ‘a boy who overheard some horrible conclave of subterranean beings in a cave’. As the work does not survive, it would be idle to point to any literary sources for it; but the influence of the Arabian Nights (the cave of Ali Baba and other stories involving caves) might be conjectured. A still more likely source, perhaps, would be his grandfather Whipple, the only member of his family who appears to have enjoyed the weird. As Lovecraft states in a late letter:

Here are some of the components (unfathomed caves, deep, low, moaning sounds) of the imagery of ‘The Noble Eavesdropper’. But Lovecraft admits that this is the only tale he wrote prior to his reading of Poe.

Poe was, by the turn of the century, slowly gaining a place of eminence in American literature, although he still had to face posthumous attacks by Henry James and others. His championing by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and other European writers had slowly impelled reconsideration of his work by English and American critics.

I do not know which edition of Poe was read by the eight-yearold Lovecraft; it must have been some school edition. It is, in fact, a little difficult to discern any clear-cut Poe influence in the first several of Lovecraft's surviving juvenile stories—‘The Little Glass Bottle’, ‘The Secret Cave; or, John Lees Adventure’, ‘The Mystery of the Grave-yard; or, A Dead Man's Revenge’, and ‘The Mysterious Ship’. None of these early stories is dated, with the exception of ‘The Mysterious Ship’ (clearly dated to 1902), but they must have been written during the period 1898–1902, perhaps more toward the earlier than the later end of that spectrum.