JF Ptak Science Books Post 2534
Carl Sandburg (whose house is about 5 miles from here) wrote a long, light-but-heavy, airy three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln that is said to have killed the president, again. Rufus Griswold, a once semi-friend of Edgar Allen Poe, became a bitter enemy whose hatred of the man extended pathologically deeply far into Poe's death. There are stories of cross-loved interests, and competition over a job, and the biggest (or more representative) thing--Poe's lukewarm review of Griswold's genre-twisting collection of American poetry, for which Poe was paid by Griswold, a bribe producing a coercion of Griwold's work. Poe was evidently never forgiven for that, and probably never forgiven for being legions smarter and far more talented than Griswold--and for all of these real or imagined ills Griswold drove a stake through Poe's eye in this very nasty obituary. It was signed with a pseudonym, but it was soon discovered that Griswold was the author.
The obit is a diatribe, pure and simple, a revenge piece that pulled Poe from his grave and killed him again. You can tell that the long column will cleave Poe in two by the end of the second and third (short) sentences: "He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it". You know at that point that whatever comes to follow will offer a rough ride, which indeed it was. There's a lot of stuff about his personal life, including a long an meandering section on his stepfather---and not one mention of anything that he wrote.
Griswold clawed his way into the heart of Poe's remains like a meth addict tracking down a ten dollar bill under a soda machine, and proceeded to defame Poe and his life via forged letters, and thus creating Poe the madman/street-crawler/drug-addicted alchie who was a friendless and betraying and brutal to anyone he knew. It took a while for Griswold's crimes against Poe to be uncovered, but the damage was done, and life force thief Griswold was safely tucked into his own dirt nap. No one deserves that sort of treatment, least of all Poe. In the end the truth was outed, with Poe recognized as himself again, with Griswold becoming the pathological necro-killer.
[Image source: Awesome Stories, https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Poe-Obituary-by-Rufus-Griswold, reprinting the obit as it appeared in the New York Tribune, October 9, 1849.]
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