Midnight dreary Book

I often disagree with historians, but John Evangelist Walsh is one of the very, very few that makes me genuinely angry. His incomprehensibly long career has been built on promoting demonstrably fictitious and horribly libelous claims against historical figures. Poe has been one of his main victims. Walsh's previous book, "Plumes in the Dust," made the lunatic, completely unsubstantiated claim that Poe fathered an illegitimate child on a married woman. In "Midnight Dreary" he piles fantasy on fantasy by suggesting that Poe was murdered by two (possibly imaginary) brothers of a woman he may have planned to marry.

As is usual with Walsh, there is absolutely no evidence to support his thesis. His M.O. is to dream up a headline-grabbing, lurid scenario. Then, he proceeds to write a work of fiction to gull the unwary into thinking he has a case. He manipulates or simply invents "evidence" for whatever half-baked idea he is promoting, while completely ignoring the usually vast amount of documentation that would utterly destroy his story. He is an expert at dreaming up fictitious scenarios and invented conversations, and then using his own creations as support!

"Midnight Dreary" is only one of his many rather frightening distorions of history. Poe scholars have long treated Walsh as a bad joke, but it is depressing to think how many readers who don't know the facts will be lured by Walsh's air of authority and pseudo-scholarship into thinking his books have any credibility. This is not history--it is a bad hoax. I have my doubts whether Walsh himself belives any of the defamatory drivel he puts out at such an alarming rate.

P.S. For a more detailed analysis of Walsh's pernicious methods here is an Emily Dickinson scholar reviewing (with great disgust) Walsh's recent "book" about the Amherst poet: