The end days of Edgar Allan Poe began in the crisp autumn days of early October in the year of 1849. Edgar Allan Poe was nearly without a penny to his name; his talent had been ripped off by unscrupulous publishers for decades. The final days of Edgar Allan Poe gave Baltimore, MD a reason to name their football team the Ravens. Poe was 40 years old and lying in a gutter after what was probably a five day binge of drinking, but probably did not include easy girls, much less chocolate pie. A great movie could be made about Edgar Allan Poe’s final five days (I would cast Sylvester Stallone) because, well, nobody knows exactly for sure what the writer of The Fall of the House of Usher and The Raven (hence the name of Baltimore’s football team) did during those days leading to his being found in the gutter.
Edgar Allan Poe’s final week ended with one of America’s most popular and best-selling writers of all time wearing a suit cheaper than an Armenian disco stud. He was recognized by newspaperman from the Baltimore Sun who later figured out that Poe’s ill-fitting suit was not Poe’s own, leading to speculation that his condition was due to the fun 19th century and 21st century practice of voting early and often for the Republicans.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote of raving lunatics who swore they could hear the hideous beating of a heart and the scratching of a cat hidden inside a wall. Some suggest that Edgar Allan Poe died as a result of rabies contracted from one of his own cats because his last few days on earth were spent in the hospital raving like a lunatic from one of his own macabre stories. Before he died on October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe mysterious began to shout out in a constant refrain “Reynolds! Reynolds!” It has long been assumed that the cry was directed to Jeremiah Reynolds, an author that Poe admired in his youth. His death was unceremonious in keeping with the fact that as a writer of pulp fiction and poetry he just wasn’t considered worth respecting.
