Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Sarah Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) to the Editor of the Broadway Journal [E. A. POE]
Letter
August 23, 1845
[Full text]

The collegial tone of this letter suggests a sense of fellow feeling shared by these controversial literary figures who were running into each other at New York salons and reviewing the same writers around this time. But Fuller's view of Poe the man and critic, if not Poe the writer of short stories, soured after the Lyceum lecture. In the July 20, 1846, issue of the Evening Mirror, she described Poe as a "poor creature" staggering around the city, "bearing in his feeble body the evidences of evil living," and went onto bemoan the fact that "this is the poor man who has been hired by a Mammon-worshipping publisher to do execution upon the gifted, noble-minded and pure-hearted men and women, whose works are cherished by their contemporaries as their dearest national treasure."

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