The foul odor that caused the narrator and Thompson to flee into the cold is the Limburger Cheese. Of course they thought it was the rotting corpse but the pine box did not contain a dead body, instead inside were a bunch of guns.
A=Edgar Poe didn't write "just anything" that would sell. If he did that, we probably wouldn't have ever heard of him for several reasons which are ultimately unimporatant to this question.
B=He claimed his first love was poetry, and he considered himself a poet before a regular, ordinary writer, but given the way the choices are worded, I'd say that B is still, with this in consideration, not the answer.
C=Edgar Poe did fabricate his personal life one time, when he created a backstory for his alias Arthur Gordon Pym.
D=True, he did invent it before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ripped off Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin.
E=Edgar Allan Poe was never insane. He was not that kind of man. He was more philosophical and aristocratic. Although in his youth he had toyed with an alcohol vice, he overcame it in his later years. He is only (and falsely) known for an alcoholic past because after Poe died, Poe's editor, Rufus Griswald slandered Poe and re-wrote Poe's biography, altering history away from the truth. Edgar Poe was never the "madman-alcoholic" that some people wrongfully believe he was.
