Edgar Allan Poe never lived to be as old as he looked. He was born poor and died poor, and in the forty years separating those events he knew success just often enough to know what he was missing, supporting himself in the meantime with hack writing and routine editorial work, never staying in one place long. Sixty years after his death, the Baltimore Sun put this sentiment more poetically: "He raised the cup of prosperity many times in his life and every time, just when he was about to place his parched lips to the draft, Fortune cast it away from him." Of course, prosperity was not the only cup he raised to his lips. Poe nurtured an artist's rage--he also gambled with money he did not have, accrued debts he could not pay, and quarreled regularly with men in a position to do him harm. In short, he acted a great deal like a genius well before posterity bestowed that laurel upon him.
Like many artists, he comforted himself with the idea that a future age wold treat his work more kindly than his own. But not even his opulent imagination could have foretold how right he was. In the century after his death, the popularity of his written work grew so much that even the physical artifacts of his publishing career would acquire the value of relics. A single faded copy of any number of his printed works took on astounding value, becoming worth several times the sum total of money he had made in his entire life. This was particularly true of his early poetry.
Travis McDade, Thieves of Books: New York's Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It, 2013
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