This story first appeared in "The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1845", published in December, 1844 in Philadelphia by Carey and Hart. Poe earned $12 for its first printing. It later was included in the 1845 collection "Tales by Edgar A. Poe". The epigraph """" (Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness) attributed by Poe to Seneca was not found in Seneca's known work. It is from Petrarch's treatise "De Remediis utriusque Fortunae". Poe probably took the reference from Samuel Warren's novel "Ten Thousand a-Year". Dupin is not a professional detective. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", Dupin takes the case for amusement and refuses a financial reward. In "The Purloined Letter", however, Dupin undertakes the case for financial gain and personal revenge. He is not motivated by pursuing truth, emphasized by the lack of information about the contents of the purloined letter. Dupin's innovative method to solve the mystery is by trying to identify with the criminal. The minister and Dupin have equally matched minds, combining skills of mathematician and poet, and their battle of wits is threatened to end in stalemate. Dupin wins because of his moral strength: the minister is "unprincipled," a blackmailer who obtains power by exploiting the weakness of others. "The Purloined Letter" completes Dupin's tour of different settings. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," he travels through city streets; in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," he is in the wide outdoors; in "The Purloined Letter," he is in an enclosed private space. French linguist Jean-Claude Milner suggests Dupin and D— are brothers, based on the final reference to Atreus and his twin brother Thyestes. In May 1844, just before its first publication, Poe wrote to James Russell Lowell that he considered "The Purloined Letter" "perhaps the best of my tales of ratiocination." When it was republished in "The Gift" in 1845, the editor called it "one of the aptest illustrations which could well be conceived of that curious play of two minds in one person." Poe's story provoked a debate among literary theorists in the 1960s and 1970s. Jacques Lacan argued in "Ecrits" that the content of the queen's letter is irrelevant to the story and that the proper "place" of the signifier (the letter itself) is determined by the symbolic structure in which it exists and is displaced, first by the minister and then by Dupin.