The obituary notices following Poe's death in 1849 struggled to make sense of what fellow-authors felt was the central contradiction of his life: that he was one of the country's preeminent literary “geniuses” yet he had lived a life of misery and privation. Overwhelmingly, Poe's contemporaries were forced to conclude that his peculiar personality was responsible for his lack of professional success. Many, like fellow-author Nathaniel Parker Willis, felt that Poe's particular habits and talents as a writer foreclosed the possibility of material reward: “Mr Poe wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid.” George R. Graham agreed: “[T]he very organization of a mind such as that of Poe - the very tension and tone of his exquisitely strung nerves . . . utterly unfitted him for the rude jostlings and fierce competitorship of trade.”