NEW YORK By the standards of any age, it was a miserable way to go. Edgar Allan Poe, dark romantic writer and poet credited with inventing the genre of detective fiction, had a death more Gothic and gloomy than any of his stories.

He was found, aged 40, wandering the streets of Baltimore, penniless, raving unintelligibly, dressed in someone else's clothes, possibly having been beaten up. He died in hospital four days later, on Oct 7, 1849, having uttered the final words “Lord, help my poor soul.”

From there it only got worse. Although he was at the time probably the most famous writer in America, his cousin Neilson Poe omitted to tell anyone he had died, and so fewer than 10 people turned up for the funeral. The priest could not be bothered to give a sermon, and the entire ceremony lasted three minutes.

On Sunday, 160 years almost to the day since his sorry passing, Poe will finally be given the send-off his multitude of fans passionately believe he deserved. At 11.30am a life-size recreation of his body will be carried in a horse-drawn carriage from his Baltimore home in Amity Street to the Westminster burying ground where two full-length ceremonies will be held in front of up to 700 admirers.

The ceremony is part of a year-long series of events to mark 200 years since Poe's birth. To the amusement of Poe experts, the double anniversary of the start and end of his life has led to an unseemly scramble between several US cities - notably Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston - to claim ownership of the writer.Organisers of the Baltimore funeral are playing their ace card, saying “We have the body!”

“There's a somewhat symbolic struggle going on to claim him,” said Stephen Rachman, president of the Poe Studies Association, speaking from an international Edgar Allan Poe conference in Philadelphia.

Of all the great classical American writers of the 19th century - Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne to name but three

- Poe had the most hapless existence. “Poor Edgar Allan Poe; of them all he was the poorest; his life was very precarious,” Rachman said.

His papers reveal that he would regularly send begging letters to magazine editors asking for as little as $10 to pay the fare to Richmond or Baltimore. But by his death he left an extraordinary legacy. His innovations in detective writing can be seen as the direct antecedent to Sherlock Holmes, for instance, or to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. His Balloon Hoax of 1844 - in which he wrote a newspaper article reporting as fact the fictitious crossing of the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon - cuts a path to Orson Welles's famous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds 94 years later.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service