celebration by the Authors' Club of London, March 1, 1909, when he credited the inspiration for his own detective stories to Edgar Allan Poe.
While Poe was working for Graham, he was contributing to The Saturday Evening Post, The Lady's Companion, The Saturday Museum, The United States Post, The Dollar Newspaper, and other publications. All of his work was clear cut and shaped to its pre-determined scheme; no detail spared, no superfluous word written. The relation not only between thoughts and words, but between words themselves was so perfectly adjusted that each caught lustre from the other, until prose and poetry alike shown as jewels against the onyx background of his sombre fancy.
With Poe's creative and critical powers going at telegraphic speed, Virginia's life was at lowest ebb, and though he worked and starved it was impossible to meet the demands of her illness. His business letters show his desperate struggles with consuming poverty, though not for his own needs. "He seems to have had no personal expenses," writes Mr. Graham. "What he received from me went directly into the hands of his mother-in-law for family comforts." When Poe's letters bore on his money obligations, anxiety to square his accounts was always first. Withal, that his generous nature was not warped is revealed in a letter written by him to James Russell Lowell, in which Poe forgives Lowell his debt and endeavors to encourage and cheer him in his struggle in Boston to maintain The Pioneer.
Poe's efforts for his own magazine again come to light in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum of March 4, 1843,
