as a reporter in February 1877. Riley accepted. He worked gathering local news, writing articles, and assisting with typesetting. He continued to write poems regularly for the newspaper and to sell other poems to larger newspapers. During the year, Riley spent working in Anderson, he met and courted Edora Mysers. The couple became engaged, but ended the relationship after they had decided against marriage in August. Despite local success at having his poems published, his submissions continued to be rejected by established eastern periodicals as being below their standards. Riley began formulating a plot to prove his work was of good quality and that it was being rejected only because his name was unknown in the east. He wrote a poem imitating the style of Edgar Allan Poe and submitted it to the Kokomo Dispatch under a fictitious name claiming it was a long-lost Poe poem. The Dispatch published the poem and reported it as such. Riley and two other men who were part of the plot waited two weeks for the poem to be published by major newspapers in Chicago, Boston, and New York to gauge their reaction; they were disappointed. While a few newspapers believed the poem was authentic, most did not, claiming the quality was too poor to be written by Poe. A Dispatch employee learned the truth of the incident and reported it to the Kokomo Tribune, which published an exposé that outed Riley as a conspirator behind the hoax. The revelation damaged the Dispatchs credibility and harmed Riley's reputation. In the aftermath of the Poe plot, Riley was dismissed from the Democrat. He returned to Greenfield to spend time writing poetry. He met Clara Louise Bottsford, a school teacher boarding in his father's home. They found they had much in common, particularly their love of literature. The couple began a 12-year, intermittent relationship, Riley's longest. In mid-1878, the couple had their first breakup caused partly by Riley's alcoholism. Riley made a first attempt to give up liquor by joining a local temperance organization but quit after a few weeks. Performing poet Without a steady income, his financial situation worsened. Riley began submitting his poems to more prominent literary magazines, including Scribner's Monthly, but was informed that although it showed promise, his work was still short of the standards required for use in their publications. Locally, he was still dealing with the stigma of the Poe