October 7

In literary history

• 1849Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious in a Baltimore tavern on election day, wearing clothes that were not his own, and died four days later without explaining himself. The cause of death remains unconfirmed; the most recent theory is rabies.
• 1993Toni Morrison became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the eighth American to win it, and the committee's phrase for her work, 'visionary force and poetic import,' is as close as prizes get to accuracy.

The Daily Canon for October 7

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe (1839).