Final Days of Edgar Allan Poe

David F. Gaylin is president of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and author of Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore (2015).

Gaylin assumes that attempts to solve the riddle of Poe's death confront two mysteries: "how did he come to be discovered in a tavern in East Baltimore, and what illness or condition actually brought him down?" (p. 3). No suspense is ruined if the most likely "illness or condition" involves alcohol, which Poe did not handle well. Readers still debate the 42 possible causes of death adduced by Gaylin in his endearingly obsessive appendix. By all accounts, Poe deteriorated after his wife's death in January 1847. Returning from Virginia in 1849, he was found incoherent in Baltimore, then a "hotbed of criminality" (p. 89). Because Poe never recovered, the mystery of his death endures, complicated by the work of Dr. John Moran, who oversaw "the hospital in which Edgar Allan Poe perished" (p. 149). For Gaylin, "no one has done more [than Moran] to mislead those seeking the facts of Poe's final days" (p. 149). However, Moran wrote "only in defense" of Poe, while the notorious Rufus Griswold "endeavored as much mythology in his effort to maim the poet's reputation" (p. 165). Recommended. All readers.

• Chapter 1Peaks and Pits, and Pendulum SwingsChapter 2On to RichmondChapter 3Missing in MobtownChapter 4“The Worse for Wear”Chapter 5Beware the Ward HeelersChapter 6Hospital on the HillChapter 7The Island of Dr. MoranChapter 8“Congestion of the Brain”Chapter 9Premature Burials, an EpilogueAppendicesAProposed and Popular Causes of Poe’s DeathBTimeline of Poe’s Final DaysCNotes on Relevant Individuals Mentioned in the TextDDr. Moran’s Letter to Maria Clemm, November 15, 1849