Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. By John Evangelist Walsh. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. xx, 199 pp. $23.00, isbn 0-8135-2605-1.)

Confusion and mystery surrounds the death of Edgar Allan Poe. These are the facts: on September 27, 1849, Poe left Richmond, Virginia, heading for New York (via Philadelphia). On October 3, he was discovered unconscious (or nearly so) on a street near a polling station in Baltimore. Taken to a hospital, Poe lapsed in and out of consciousness for several days. He was unable to say what happened to him—to explain, for example, why his expensive suit had been replaced by cheap, tattered, and dirty clothes—before he died on October 7 at age forty. No death certificate was filed, and the only extant contemporary news report identified the cause of Poe's death as "congestion of the brain." . . .

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