Edgar Allan Poe's self-appointed literary executor was his enemy, who wrote his obituary under a false name and rewrote his letters

Poe and the editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold had feuded for years. Two days after Poe died, Griswold published an obituary under the pen name "Ludwig" in the New York Tribune. It attacked Poe's character. Griswold then said Poe had asked, shortly before his death, for Griswold to be his literary executor. Through Poe's aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, he gained access to Poe's papers. He issued an edition of Poe's works with a "Memoir of the Author" that scholars describe as full of fabrications; part was lifted from Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Caxtons. He changed and invented passages in Poe's private letters. The campaign lasted until Griswold died eight years later. His portrait of Poe as a drunk and madman shaped Poe's reputation for decades^†. Poe was 40 and had been found delirious in Baltimore days before his death^†. Clemm, his closest surviving relative, did not receive income from the edition^†.