During a recent interview, the subject and I serendipitously discovered a common affinity for the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

"That's something I don't often admit," I said. "Quite often you tell someone you like Poe, and you're perceived as morbid, Gothic, and a little bit demented."

She shrugged and said simply, "He was a good writer."

That he was. Rodney White introduced me to Poe many years ago when I was a student in his seventh grade literature class. The famous author looked down on us every day, the first in a line of posters that decorated Mr. White's bulletin board, which stretched almost the entire length of one wall.

An ascot at his neck, his eyes melancholy, and his hair slightly unkempt, Poe was with us as we read about the old man with the pale blue eye in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and listened to Mr. White read to us from Poe's melodious poem about a black bird that had a penchant for repeating itself.

Poe was a fascinating study. A brilliant, gifted writer who was haunted by personal demons, misfortune, and ill health. Orphaned before he was three, he was educated in England and at the University of Virginia and the United States Military Academy . While finding small success as a writer of poetry and short stories, he went through a series of jobs as an editor and critic for literary magazines. His work was popular, but it didn't make him rich.

When he was 27, he married his cousin (she was 14), but he was a widower 11 years later. Two years after his wife's death from an exhaustive illness, the 40-year-old Poe was found unconscious on a back street in Baltimore . He died a few days after being admitted to Washington College Hospital, apparently the victim of alcoholism and his own bleak perception of life.

But the exact cause of Poe's death is as mysterious as any of his writings and has been the subject of considerable speculation. Death certificates apparently weren't required in Maryland in October of 1849, and searches as recent as the late 1960s have failed to turn up one for Poe.

"The aftermath of Poe's death was a long and intricate story full of the sound and fury of a controversy about the nature of the man's personality, his loves and misfortunes," according to scholar Hervey Allen, "and for years it was a tale told by idiots, male and female, in which incredible oceans of slushy sentimentality, bathos, and wishy-washy hysteria broke in waves of froth over the submerged rocks of fact."

Slushy sentimentality wasn't to be found in a theory published a few years ago by an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland, which ranks among the more imaginative speculations, but is probably as close to the truth as any other. According to Dr. R. Michael Benitez, Poe died from rabies.

When Poe regained consciousness the day after he arrived at the hospital, he was sweating, hallucinating, and screaming at people who weren't there. The following day, he felt better but didn't remember how or when he became ill. He became confused and hostile again the day after, and then died.

The good Dr. Benitez diagnosed the author's behavior as a textbook symptom of a rabies victim. A plausible theory, but, with so many conflicting accounts about Poe's last days in existence, hardly conclusive. The last chapter of Poe's life story remains unwritten and enigmatic.

And maybe that's as it should be. Poe is, after all, the father of the modern mystery story, and even if he'd written nothing more than "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget," that's no small legacy.

My favorite Poe quotation, though, is from a different story, the opening line of "The Fall of the House of Usher," one of the finest sentences ever written by a human being:

"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung ominously low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."

And it's never sounded better than the first time Mr. White read it to us in class 24 years ago.