“Once upon a midnight dreary / While I pondered weak and weary / Over many a curious volume of forgotten lore” – what drove Edgar Allan Poe to pen these immortal lines? Was it the twisted imagination of an opium addict? Was it the internal cry of a boy orphaned at young age, who spent his best decades alone? The only public clues Poe gave were in his follow-up essay, where he pointed to the raven as a work “that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.” That it did.

On this day, January 29, 1845, an “advance copy” of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven ran in New York’s The Evening Mirror newspaper. That publication was not his first choice: Poe offered the poem to his former employer George Rex Graham, publisher of the eponymous magazine, but Graham turned him down (the poem may not have been in its completed form at that point).

Poe made his mark with a public hoax a year before The Raven was published. Writing for the Sun newspaper in New York, Poe “broke” the story of a European traveler who crossed the Atlantic in a gas balloon in three days (the first such flight took place fifty years later and went considerably slower). The story caused  a sensation, and may have been the inspiration for Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days, which also described balloon travel.