In October 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found near death on the streets of Baltimore. The famed author was incoherent, dressed in someone else’s clothes, and seemingly insane. Days after he was found and taken to the hospital, he died without ever saying what had happened to put him in his weary state.

Poe’s death seems fitting based on how we view the author in pop culture today. Poe was an eccentric, drug-addled madman. He wrote horrific stories because he was out of his mind, making his untimely death in Baltimore seem logical.

But it isn’t.

While Poe’s death is a mystery that remains unsolved to this day, we do know one thing for certain: everything we thought we knew about Poe was wrong. He wasn’t some crazed lunatic who managed to publish some of the most successful stories of his day by chance. He wasn’t living on the fringes of society. He wasn’t the type of person to wind up on the streets in different clothes, babbling nonsense words and calling out to someone named ‘Reynolds.’

This version of Poe is completely false. And it all stems from this guy:

That’s Rufus Griswold. He hated Poe with a passion. This hatred came after years of rivalry between the two authors, which started after Griswold released an anthology of poems that was reviewed poorly by Poe.

The story goes that Poe submitted a few poems to the anthology and Griswold graciously accepted them. Griswold then asked Poe, who was a literary critic and magazinist at the time, to review the anthology, thinking — logically — that Poe would give it a good review because his own work was published within it. He didn’t. That’s not how Poe rolled.

Instead, Poe published a scathing review of the work and Griswold himself, sparking a literary rivalry that lasted until Poe’s death and ultimately one of the longest standing smear campaigns of literary history.

So how did Griswold pull this off? How did he take a pretty public figure — Poe was known for his lectures, reviews, and was basically a celebrity back in the day — and change his entire image? Well, it all started moments after Poe’s death.