Eight blank years later he pops up in Richmond, and in the ninth and tenth years he endeavors to truthify his message, which has been cordially usurped and betrayed as fiction by "Mr. Poe"; when he dies in July 1838 immediately after writing his preface, in circumstances even more equivocal than those of his author's death eleven years later, he's still only in his thirtieth year to heaven, a threshold more poetical than mythical.