Page 63 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor

how we pronounce them:

[Illustration: (music) Keep--ing time, time, time, in a sort of Ru-nic rhyme.]

CHAPTER XIII

POE’S LATER YEARS

Poe had the hardest time of his life when he was at New York, living in that

little cottage at Fordham, where his poor wife died. He was always
borrowing money, from sheer necessity, to keep himself and his wife from

starvation. Once while in New York he was so hard pressed that Mrs.
Clemm went out to see if she could not get work for him. She went to the
office of Nathaniel P. Willis, who was the editor and proprietor of The

Mirror. Willis was then starting The Evening Mirror, and said he would
give Poe work. So the poet came; he had his little desk in the corner, and

did his work meekly and regularly,--poor hack work for which he was paid
very little.

Later he had an interest in a paper called The Broadway Journal. When it
was about to cease publication Poe bought it himself for fifty dollars,

giving a note which Horace Greeley endorsed and finally paid.

Once a young man wrote to Greeley, saying, "Doubtless among your papers

you have many autographs of the poet, Edgar Allan Poe," and intimated
that he should like to have one of them. Greeley wrote back that he had just

one autograph of Poe among his papers; it was attached to a note for fifty
dollars, and Greeley’s own signature was across the back. The young man
might have it for just half its face value.

But after Poe bought The Broadway Journal he had no money to carry it

on, and its publication was soon suspended.

He earned his livelihood mainly by writing stories or articles for various

magazines and papers, which paid him from $5 to $50 each. It was a hand