In case you wondered …

… Can You Really Separate Edgar Allan Poe's Work from His Life? | CrimeReads. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As Symons attempts to demonstrate, Poe’s work emerged from a life that created a “split man, a divided personality.” Poe could be “a wonderfully quick, intelligent and perceptive man, with a butterfly mind that never rested for long on a subject.” But he had a maddening ability to sabotage his own successes, to promise more than he could deliver—this was especially apparent in his varying relationships with and failed proposals to several women after he was widowed—and to attack, in print, those who could help him. Poe was a man afflicted by hubris, one who “intended to write down to the level of his readers, yet rarely managed it.”