Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849. By October 9, he had already been invented.

The obituary published two days after his death — signed "Ludwig," later revealed as Rufus Wilmot Griswold, his literary executor and personal enemy — was not biography. It was preemptive mythology. It described a man of "scant virtues" and "numerous vices," a drunk, a madman, a moral failure whose genius was incidental to his depravity. Within weeks, Griswold had gone further: forging letters, altering texts, inserting fabricated passages into documents Poe had actually written. The archive was corrupted before the body was cold.

This is the story this volume tells — in the original documents themselves, with critical apparatus that reads them not as access to the historical Poe but as the machinery through which he was constructed.

Layer 0: The Epistolary Self — Poe's own letters to John Allan, the foster father who disinherited him; the only documents in which Poe speaks before the invention begins.

Layer 1: The Founding Defamation — Griswold's "Ludwig" obituary (1849) and Memoir of the Author (1850): the poisoned origin, with a full accounting of the documented forgeries and textual crimes.

Layer 2: The Immediate Response — Willis, Graham, and the counter-fabrications: those who knew Poe and fought Griswold's version, and why their counter-narratives are themselves constructions.

Layer 3: The European Invention — Baudelaire's New Notes on Edgar Poe (1857): how a French poet transformed the American drunk into the archetype of the poète maudit, and sent that invention back across the Atlantic to replace the original.

Layer 4: The Gendered Testimony — Sarah Helen Whitman's Edgar Poe and His Critics (1860): the silenced archive, the woman who loved him, and what her testimony reveals about who controlled the narrative.

Layer 5: The Systematic Rehabilitation — Ingram, Woodberry, Weiss: the Victorian biographers who dismantled Griswold's defamation and replaced it with a different mythology equally distant from the historical person.

Poe's Own Voice — The Philosophy of Composition and selections from The Literati of New York City: the texts in which Poe most deliberately constructed his own public persona, and what that construction reveals about the man who performed it.

✦ The complete primary documents of Poe's biographical fabrication — letters, obituaries, memoirs, critical essays, and Poe's own writings — with individual introductions, a forgeries apparatus, editorial notes, and a closing essay by Henry Bugalho.

This edition also includes:

✦ The Fabrication of a Literary Figure — Henry Bugalho's critical introduction: fourteen chapters tracing the full architecture of the Poe myth from Griswold's forgeries through Baudelaire's transatlantic reinvention to the recursive contamination of The Raven itself

✦ A Closing Essay: What the Collection Reveals — the synthesis: what happens when you read all the layers simultaneously, and why the impossibility of reaching the historical Poe is not a failure of scholarship but the central fact of his literary afterlife

✦ A full forgeries apparatus documenting Griswold's textual crimes: the specific passages altered, the letters fabricated, and the archival consequences that shaped every Poe biography written since

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Classic American literature — and the most documented case of literary mythmaking in its history

✦ Gothic fiction and the writer who invented the American dark imagination

✦ Literary biography and the archaeology of how writers become cultural myths

✦ The complete story of Edgar Allan Poe — including the parts Griswold invented and Baudelaire exported to Europe