page_title: Death of Edgar Allan Poe
section_title: Posthumous character assassination
hierarchical_section_title: Death of Edgar Allan Poe / Posthumous character assassination
caption_attribution_description: Engraving of American critic, editor, and author Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Español: Grabado de una edición de 1855 de The Poets and Poetry of America.
context_page_description: The death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7, 1849, has remained mysterious. The circumstances leading up to it are uncertain, and the cause of death is disputed. On October 3, the American author was found delirious in Baltimore, Maryland, "in great distress, and ... in need of immediate assistance", according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died at 5 a.m. on Sunday, October 7. He was 40 years old. Poe was never able to explain how he came to be in this condition.
  Much of the extant information about the last few days of Poe's life comes from his attending physician, Dr. John Joseph Moran, though his credibility is questionable. Poe was buried after a small funeral at the back of Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, but his remains were moved to a new grave with a larger monument in 1875. The newer monument also marks the burial place of Poe's wife, Virginia, and his mother-in-law, Maria. Theories as to what caused Poe's death include suicide, murder, cholera, hypoglycemia, rabies, syphilis, influenza, and that Poe was a victim of cooping. Evidence of the influence of alcohol is strongly disputed.
context_section_description: On October 9, the day of Poe's burial, an obituary appeared in the New York Tribune. Signed only "Ludwig", the obituary floridly alternated between praising the dead author's abilities and eloquence and damning his temperament and ambition. "Ludwig" said that "literary art lost one of its most brilliant, but erratic stars" but also claimed Poe was known for walking the streets in delirium, muttering to himself and that he was excessively arrogant, assumed all men were villains, and was quick to anger. "Ludwig" was later revealed to be Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a former colleague and acquaintance of Poe. Even while Poe was still alive, Griswold had engaged in character assassination. Much of his characterization in the obituary was lifted almost verbatim from that of the fictitious Francis Vivian in The Caxtons by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The obituary quickly became the standard characterization of Poe.
  Griswold also claimed that Poe had asked him to be his literary executor. He had served as an agent for several American authors, but it is unclear whether Poe appointed him to be the executor or whether Griswold became executor through a trick or a mistake by Poe's aunt and mother-in-law, Maria. In 1850 he presented, in collaboration with James Russell Lowell and Nathaniel Parker Willis, a collection of Poe's work that included a biographical article titled "Memoir of the Author", in which Poe was depicted as a depraved, drunk, drug-addled madman. Many parts of it were believed to have been fabricated by Griswold, and it was denounced by those who had known Poe, including Sarah Helen Whitman, Charles Frederick Briggs, and George Rex Graham. This account became popularly accepted, in part because it was the only full biography available and was widely reprinted. It also remained popular because many readers assumed that Poe was similar to his fictional characters or were thrilled at the thought of reading the works of an "evil" man.
  A more accurate biography of Poe did not appear until John Henry Ingram's of 1875. Even so, historians continued to use Griswold's depiction as a model for their own biographies of Poe, including W. H. Davenport in 1880, Thomas R. Slicer in 1909, and Augustus Hopkins Strong in 1916. Many used Poe as a cautionary tale against alcohol and drugs. In 1941, Arthur Hobson Quinn presented evidence that Griswold had forged and re-written a number of Poe's letters that were included in his "Memoir of the Author". By then, Griswold's depiction of Poe was entrenched in the mind of the public, both in America and around the world, and this distorted image of the author has become part of the Poe legend despite attempts to dispel it.
caption: Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Poe's literary executor, wrote the most famous obituary of Poe as well as his first full biography.
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