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Trivia / Edgar Allan Poe

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  • Creator Breakdown: Poe married his 13-year-old second cousin at age 26. Her death greatly affected him, and the premature death of a beautiful woman was the basis for quite a few of his stories. He even stated that it is the most poetical topic in the world. However, the trope was pretty common for his day. Poe was certainly not a very stable person.
  • God Never Said That: Popular legend holds that The Cask of Amontillado was inspired by an 1817 incident at Fort Independence in which a popular officer named Lieutenant Robert Massie was killed in a duel by Lieutenant Gustavus Drane. Enlisted soldiers bent on revenge allegedly got Drane piss-drunk, lured him into the fort's catacombs, and sealed him up behind a brick wall while he was passed out. While the duel was real and Massie was killed, the rest of the story is false. Drane was tried by court-martial for the killing of Massie, but the duel was ruled legal. The soldiers at Fort Independence were hostile towards Drane, but he was quickly transferred to another post before anything else happened. Drane stayed in the Army the rest of his life, and oversaw the establishment of a fort bearing his name in Florida during the Second Seminole War in 1835. He died in 1846. A skeleton was found chained to a wall in the catacombs of Fort Independence during a renovation in 1905, but despite stories of it wearing an Army officer's uniform, it most likely belonged to an unidentified inmate incarcerated there while the fort was used as a Massachusetts state prison in the latter half of the 19th Century (several decades after Poe's death), and certainly wasn't Drane. Poe himself never propagated this myth; he was quite forthcoming that the story was actually written as a Take That! against Thomas Dunn English (one of Poe's many bitter enemies) in response to English's novel 1844, which had featured an unflattering expy of Poe. Their long-running feud involved verbal altercations, lawsuits, a fistfight (in which both men claimed to have curbstomped the other), and finally settled on publishing blatant Revenge Fic material about each other.

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