Toasted

There was a minor stir in the back alleys of American literature yesterday:  for the first time since 1949, the enigmatic Poe Toaster failed to appear at Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore gravesite yesterday to mark Poe's January 19 birthday.

The Poe Toaster is the mysterious figure — usually in a black coat and hat — who strolls into Baltimore's Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in the early hours of January 19, silently walks to at Poe's gravesite, toasts Poe with a glass of cognac, then...