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manager who had just purchased a journal. The crassly ambitious Burton welcomed Poe’s collaboration in publishing Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and paid him ten dollars per week. Although Burton suppressed a few stinging reviews, Poe again indulged in the occasional “using up” of mediocre writers, a tactic that attracted publicity. But he also contributed original tales, including his satire of an American Indian fighter, “The Man That Was Used Up,” and his incomparable “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Praised by critics and fellow writers (such as Washington Irving), the latter tale confirmed Poe’s emerging importance as a writer of fiction, and perhaps convinced Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia to publish a two-volume edition in 1840 called Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. A reviewer in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger declared that Poe had “placed himself in the foremost rank of American writers” with his Tales. Poe reciprocated by contributing short articles to the Philadelphia newspaper and by promising, as an intellectual exhibition, to solve any cryptograms sent to him. He simultaneously prepared for Burton’s a serialized (and heavily plagiarized) narrative about Western exploration called The Journal of Julius Rodman. As a writer enamored of “the foreign subject” Poe must have resented Burton’s announcement of a $1000 literary contest that included $250 for five tales illustrating different eras in American history or portraying U.S. regional differences. His contempt for Burton prompted him to tell a friend: “As soon as Fate allows I will have a magazine of my own—and will endeavor to kick up a dust.”

That idea became increasingly irresistible. In 1840, as Rodman’s apocryphal journal was unfolding in monthly installments and as Poe unscrambled cryptograms for Alexander’s, he also devised a plan to start his own periodical. In Burton’s he decided to play the literary sleuth by accusing Harvard professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarizing from Tennyson. Poe also published a fine new poem of his own, “Sonnet—To Silence,” as well as “Peter Pendulum, the Business Man,” a biting satire perhaps aimed obliquely at Burton but more obviously targeting American commercial greed. In March, Burton lamely reneged on the announced premiums for original works, and two months later, intent on building a new theater, he prepared to sell his journal. Poe seized the moment to print a prospectus for his own periodical, to be called the Penn Magazine, but when Burton saw the circular, he accused Poe of disloyalty, fired him, and demanded repayment of money already advanced. The dismissal provoked a blazing reply in which Poe warned Burton, “If by accident you have taken it into your head that I am to be insulted with impunity I can only assume that you are an ass.”

Out of work, Poe enlisted contributors and subscribers for his proposed journal, which he envisioned as having a “lasting effect upon the growing literature of the country.” He found a new ally in Frederick W. Thomas, a Cincinnati novelist and Whig partisan who campaigned in Philadelphia for presidential candidate William Henry Harrison. Another sympathetic figure was George Graham, who edited the Saturday Evening Post, owned The Casket, and in October acquired Burton’s. Graham generously lauded Poe’s plans for the Penn, and when illness forced Poe to postpone the project, Graham solicited his work for his amalgamated monthly, Graham’s Magazine. In the first issue, Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” signaled the beginning of an important connection with Graham, for when a bank crisis in early 1841 forced another delay in the Penn, Poe gratefully assumed responsibility for book reviews in Graham’s at an annual salary of eight hundred dollars. But the monthly also provided a venue for new tales: developing the city mysteries premise of “The Man of the Crowd,” he invented the modern detective story in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in April, and the following month published “A Descent into the Maelström.” Poe also contributed a series on cryptography, “A Few Words on