He distracted himself from constant worry about Virginia by playing the literary lion in New York salons and by plunging into daily journalism. But his squibs for the Mirror and subsequent contributions to a new newspaper, the Broadway Journal, curbed his productivity in fiction, which in 1845 amounted to only four new tales, including “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” But his newfound fame, partly excited by Lowell’s biographical sketch of Poe in Graham’s, gave him greater editorial freedom, which he used to renew his attacks on Longfellow. He extended his assault on the professor poet in a well-attended February lecture on American poetry, but he also remained adamant about copyright, and that month published “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” his most searing analysis of literary property and the economic thralldom of American authors. Evert Duyckinck, leader of Young America, rewarded Poe’s advocacy of copyright by publishing first Tales and then The Raven and Other Poems in his Library of American Books.

Soon after his “Prison-House” manifesto, Poe joined the staff of the Broadway Journal, which was owned by John Bisco and Charles F. Briggs. There he accelerated the Longfellow war by adopting a pseudonym (or so it appears) to stage a notorious debate with himself about the revered poet. Briggs initially countenanced Poe’s monomania on plagiarism, but by May became alarmed by his renewed drinking after a long abstinence. Lowell and Chivers, who both visited New York that spring, testified to his reckless dissipation. But Poe managed somehow to revise many of his tales and poems for reprinting in the weekly, and among his numerous reviews he celebrated the poet Mrs. Francis Sargent Osgood, with whom he was carrying on an ostensibly platonic, semi-public “amour” sanctioned by his ailing wife. Wishing to give the journal a “fresh start,” Briggs planned to relieve Poe of his editorial role and find a new publisher, but when his partner disagreed, Briggs withdrew, and Bisco named Poe editor, offering him half of the meager profits. The crisis came in October: that month Poe made his infamous appearance at the Boston Lyceum, reading not a promised new poem but rather the early, esoteric “Al Aaraaf.” The outcry from that fiasco had not subsided when Bisco capitulated and sold out to Poe, who through loans from friends became sole proprietor of a failing literary journal. Despite the attraction of his revised, reprinted works and his biting editorial commentaries— in which for weeks he taunted his Boston critics—the Broadway Journal was in a death spiral. Beset by debts, Poe ceased publication on January 3, 1846, the final issue ironically reprinting his early tale “Loss of Breath.”

Illness, poverty, and scandal dogged Poe through 1846. For Graham’s he composed “The Philosophy of Composition,” an exaggerated account of how he wrote “The Raven.” A jealous Elizabeth F. Ellet stirred a controversy involving Mrs. Osgood’s love letters to Poe that ostracized him from the popular salon of Anne C. Lynch. The episode also provoked a bizarre scuffle with Thomas Dunn English, who had moved to New York and become an unlikely ally in the Longfellow wars but defied Poe at a volatile moment. Rumors of Poe’s insanity and Virginia’s worsening condition prompted their move to healthier surroundings in Fordham, where they rented a country cottage. Still unwell, Poe prepared for Godey’s a series on the “New York Literati,” flattering friends and abusing enemies in pithy sketches. He also continued his “Marginalia” series but composed only one notable new tale—perhaps inspired by his feud with English—titled “The Cask of Amontillado.” The “Literati” sketch portraying English as an ignorant charlatan elicited a slanderous reply for which Poe eventually received a legal settlement. But in 1846 he increasingly became an object of private gossip and public derision by “little birds of prey”; alluding to his latest renunciation of drink, he called Virginia his “only stimulus now to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory, and ungrateful life.” In letters to Philip Pendleton Cooke and George W. Evelith, he nevertheless revealed his determination to publish The Stylus, the “one great purpose” of his literary life. But at year’s end that goal seemed remote; both Poe and Virginia were bedridden in Fordham, attended by Mrs. Clemm and Marie Louise Shew, a friend with nursing experience.

For Virginia, the end came on January 30, 1847. On her deathbed she asked her husband to read Mrs. Shew a poignant letter from the second Mrs. John Allan, confessing that she had turned Poe’s foster father against him.