Quote of the Day

"Were it not so terrible I should often laugh at my American lady correspondents. Half their time and space is devoted to slandering each other--swearing that Poe cared only for them, and that everybody else who lays claim to his friendship is an impostor! That they (each one says the same) were only girls when he knew them, and when he died, and so could not vindicate him to the world, etc.!!...In fact, they all look upon Poe's fame as a convenient peg upon which to hang their own mediocrities where the world may see!"
-John H. Ingram, letter to Sarah Helen Whitman

It's amazing to me how, in the course of his Poe research, Ingram admitted a number of times that he had become increasingly skeptical, or downright contemptuous, about the veracity of most of his sources--the female ones in particular...but he wound up including them all in his book anyway.