Junto Boys

WHAT ABOUT POE

Last year, the writer Matthew Pearl published a novel called The Poe Shadow, in which a young lawyer sets out to solve one of the great enduring mysteries of American literary history: What killed Edgar Allan Poe?

There are numerous competing theories about Mr. Poe’s death—the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, even has an exhibit dedicated to all of them. Some Poe experts believe it was the result of drink. Others think he had rabies.

The immediate circumstances of Mr. Poe’s death are not in dispute. He had been missing for several days when a man named Snodgrass found him on the night of Oct. 3, 1849, barely conscious and wearing clothes that did not fit, and brought him to Washington College Hospital for treatment. “At the hospital he kind of ranted and raved,” Mr. Pearl said. Three days later, he was dead.

But 25 years later they dug him up.

. . .“the sexton who attended to the removal of the poet’s body” had lifted the head during the exhumation and reported seeing the brain “[rattling] around inside just like a lump of mud.” The sexton reportedly thought that “the brain had dried and hardened in the skull.”

“What I realized was, if that was the case, it would be the only physical evidence we have of what Poe’s condition was at his time of death,” Mr. Pearl said.

Intrigued, Mr. Pearl asked a coroner for an expert opinion. “I read her the description,” Mr. Pearl said, “and she said, ‘Well, that person is just wrong. Unless you embalm the body, the brain is the first thing to liquefy. There’s no way it would still be there 25 years later.’”

But a tumor, the coroner said, can calcify while the rest of the body decomposes. Perhaps that’s what the witnesses were describing, she suggested. Sure enough, when Mr. Pearl looked up photographs of brain tumors, he saw that some of them really did look like shrunken brains.

Next, Mr. Pearl ran his theory by some experts. One was Hal Poe, a descendant of the writer who serves on the board of the Poe Museum, and who told Pearl that he had “stumbled onto something quite important.” Mr. Pearl then went to Poe scholar James Hutchisson, who had advanced the tumor theory a year earlier in a Poe biography, based on other evidence, including the fact that Dr. Moran initially reported the cause of death as “congestion of the brain.”

Despite the enthusiasm with which experts like Mr. Hutchisson have greeted his findings, Mr. Pearl isn’t claiming to have solved the mystery once and for all. But he’s excited to have found a concrete lead amid the tangle of unsubstantiated theories: “At least [the tumor theory] has some evidence and some trails that you can follow that … It’s not just throwing the word ‘rabies’ out there and thinking, ‘That sounds good!’...I’d hope in this case someone picks up the scent and finds more on this.”

That's certainly better than he drank himself to death.