On January 19, the day before our government stepped up the pace on taking away the earnings of the disfavored, Edgar Allan Poe was born–200 years early. Today, three cities are fighting over his legacy. “For a poet and short-story writer devoted to elegy and horror, a man whose great subject was death, such posthumous popularity is rich in irony,” writes Julia Klein for Obit Magazine.

Let us quote Poe’s own words to apply to this situation: “… it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum.”