The kind of fight I like -- over a man of letters

• A tussle over the legacy -- and the body -- of Edgar Allen Poe pits Philadelphia against Baltimore.

This is the kind of fight I like. I'm pulling for Bal'mer.

According to an article in the New York Times this weekend, two scholars have gotten into a clash over which city -- Philadelphia or Baltimore -- has the most claim to the legacy of Edgar Allen Poe.

Baltimore is the city most associated today with Poe. He died there in 1849. How he died is, for some, an open question. Some say it was alcoholism, some say other diseases, some even say murder. He had lost his wife about two years before that while they were living in New York City.

Poe lay in an unmarked grave in Baltimore for two decades, but then th city embraced him and today he is honored as a native son.

But Philadelphia has more claim on Poe than Baltimore, according to a Edward Pettit, a Poe scholar. It was in the City of Brotherly Love that Poe wrote some of his most famous works. Pettit argues that the city's rampant violence and crime served as a natural inspiration to Poe's marcabre outlook and his detective fiction. Poe is widely acknowledged as having invented the modern detective genre. Pettit wants Poe's body moved to Philly.

Not so fast, says Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House in Baltimore. Poe is too much a part of the city's lore and character to be moved now. Besides, Philadelphia is a little late in claiming Poe since the city has ignored him for 160 years.

Of course, there is always Richmond, where Poe grew up and to where he had planned to return eventually. Poe always considered himself a Virginian. But Richmond (wisely?) has not asked for the return of the body.

In all this, I stand with Baltimore, which is a far more interesting place than Philadelphia. Baltimore is a dank, working class town with no Mainline pretentions but lots of interesting character and architecture. It's the city where Edgar Allen Poe should be from, even if he isn't.

A literary flame who died too soon

Those who die too young provoke particular sadness.

Earlier this summer, we noted the 100th anniversary of the day American letters lost one of its brightest and briefest flames -- Stephen Crane.

Crane's one novel was the Red Badge of Courage, which contained descriptions of the confusion and terror of a Civil War battle so real that veterans of the conflict said Crane got it exactly right. Crane had never been in a battle when he wrote the book. He had been born six years after the war ended.

Crane did see action after the book was published and after he had achieved fame because of it. He took on the role of celebrity reporter for Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World when they were trying by any means to one-up their rival William Randolph Hearst and the New York Herald in covering the Spanish-American War in 1898. The World sent Crane to Cuba, and while he was there, the editors demanded "hair-raising dispatches (and) bombastic scoops on heroism," he said.

The young writer did see action and described it well, even helping fellow reporter Edward Marshall to safety when he had been shot. Crane recorded the last dispatch from the dying Marshall and filed it before he filed his own, which eventually landed him in some hot water with his editors, who accused him of disloyalty when he returned to America.

Crane quit the World and moved to England and continued to write fiction. He had come under heavy criticism from proper Victorians because of his choice of a mate -- a former brothel keeper from Miami who helped him run up massive debts while in Europe. Crane faced a tougher foe than critics or bill collectors, however. He contracted tuberculosis and spent his last months in a desperate attempt to find relief.

That attempt failed, and on June 5, 1900, he died. He was 28 years old.

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(Much of the informtion here about Crane's journalism comes from Denis Bryant, Pulitzer: A Life, John Wiley, 2001.)