Dining With Poe by Halie

Dining With Poe by Halie - February 2016 Scholarship Essay

Historical figures, by a rule, are seen as great. Many are presumed to be otherworldly, something that an average person cannot live up to. Some are more mysterious than others, their past having not been documented in detail as much as many historians would have liked posthumous. For this reason, I would choose Edgar Allan Poe. He is probably one of the most misconstrued, exaggerated, and enigmatic authors in history. His life was trailed by death, his mother, step-mother, brother, and wife all having succumbed to tuberculosis.
His own death was a mystery, having been found in a public house while on a trip to visit what was presumed to be his fiancé in 1849. The short stories he had written were well known, and made him wildly popular— especially in the south, where he became a member of a magazine and wrote scathing reviews on the most popular writers of the time. He is compared to Shakespeare, and one of the best known American authors. I would choose him just to know if it was all circumstance, a dash of luck that he and his works grew to such heights, or if it was something else altogether. I would want to know what had happened that night in 1849 where he disappeared for only a brief period of time. About his life in general, without it being embellished by his achievements and almost physic revelations.