January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849
Today is the 162nd anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s death at age 40. Poe led a difficult life, which started when both of his parents died within three years after he was born. Poe spent many years of his short life impoverished while he wrote numerous poems, short stories, a play and novel. Poe also worked as a literary critic but his tough and insulting reviews alienated other authors in the country.
Upon Poe’s death, a writer named Rufus Griswold, a target of Poe’s insulting reviews, wrote a slanderous obituary as revenge for the reviews. Furthermore, he wrote a memoir “…in which he portrayed Poe as a drunken, womanizing madman with no morals and no friends.”1 Griswold hoped that the memoir would cause a dislike for Poe and his literary work but to the contrary, it caused even more intrigue in the author.
Until 2010, every year since 1949, on the anniversary of Poe’s birthday, a stranger known as the “Poe Toaster,” would place three roses and a half-bottle of cognac in the middle of the night on Poe’s grave in Baltimore. However, as reported here, in 2010, the Poe Toaster failed to show.
