Cities duel over Poe's remains

BALTIMORE — Edgar Allan Poe never lived in one city for long, and ever since he died and was buried in Baltimore in 1849, the city has claimed him as its own.

But last year Edward Pettit, a Poe scholar in Philadelphia, began arguing that Poe's remains belong in Philadelphia. Poe wrote many of his most noteworthy works there and, according to Pettit, that city's rampant crime and violence in the mid-19th century framed Poe's sinister outlook and inspired his creation of the detective-fiction genre.

"So, Philadelphians, let's hop in our cars, drive down I-95 and appropriate a body from a certain Baltimore cemetery," Pettit wrote in an article for the Philadelphia City Paper in October. "I'll bring the shovel."

No one has taken up Pettit's call for Philadelphia's best grave robbers to bring home the city's prodigal son before the bicentennial of Poe's birth in January 2009. But the argument between the cities over the body and legacy of the master of the macabre has continued in blogs and newspapers, and on Jan. 13, Pettit is to square off with an opponent from Baltimore to settle the matter in a debate at the Philadelphia Free Library.

"Philadelphia can keep its broken bell and its cheesesteak, but Poe's body isn't going anywhere," said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House in Baltimore and Pettit's opponent in the debate.

This is not the first time a city other than Baltimore has laid claim to Poe.

The author had his greatest success while living in New York after "The Raven" was published in 1845. Years after Poe's death, his relatives were considering moving his body to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Historians also look to Richmond, Va., as deserving of his legacy.

Kevin Hayes, a Poe scholar and an English professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, said Poe's body belonged in Richmond because he grew up and started his literary career there.

Poe described himself as a Virginian and wrote that he planned to return there, Hayes said, adding, "That gives Richmond more of a claim than any other city."

The one city that probably will never claim Poe is Boston.

Though he was born there, Poe wrote disdainfully of the city's literary elite, and his birthplace does not appear among the 1,000-plus attractions on the city's tourism Web site.

"Poe belongs to Baltimore because he is fully a part of that city's lore," said Liliane Weissberg, professor of comparative literature and a Poe scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Philadelphia already has Ben Franklin, and that is enough," Weissberg said.

Baltimore is also where Poe wrote his first horror story, "Berenice," which is about mutilation and people being buried alive, Jerome said.

"It was the public reaction from this city to that story which convinced Poe that horror was the way to go," he said. Jerome added that everything would be settled at the debate and in the way Poe would have wanted.

"I will argue the other guy down with grace and facts," he said. "Then I will walk over to him like a gentleman and punch him square in the nose."