The story of Edgar Allan Poe's life remains one of the most disputed and slandered in the pages of American biography, despite conscious attempts to revise the story and rehabilitate the life. Decadence and immorality, in the form of alcoholism, opium addiction, and his relationships with women, and prolific production, as a journalist, editor, poet, reviewer, critic, and fiction writer, have been emphasized as characterizing his brief life.

Although very few authors have been written about as often as Poe, little is known of his whereabouts for months, or his activities and their motives. Some of the mystery was the doing of Poe himself. Hungering for literary fame, Poe, by acting at times as his own publicist, purposively misled and sensationalized. For example, invoking Byronic images, he passed himself off as an adventurer who traveled to South America or as a soldier of fortune who went to Russia...