The late Mr. Poe gets a (very) late funeral

Edgar Allan Poe was, by almost all accounts, a miserable and ill-tempered SOB who lived an absolutely wretched life. But he was also a brilliant writer, and this year, as we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth, he is at last being granted the kind of lavish funeral he missed out on the first time.

Poe’s cousin, Neilson Poe, never announced his death publicly. Fewer than 10 people attended the hasty funeral for one of the 19th century’s greatest writers. And the injustices piled on. Poe’s tombstone was destroyed before it could be installed, when a train derailed and crashed into a stonecutter’s yard. Rufus Griswold, a Poe enemy, published a libelous obituary that damaged Poe’s reputation for decades.

But on Sunday, Poe’s funeral will get an elaborate do-over, with two services expected to draw about 350 people each _ the most a former church next to his grave can hold. Actors portraying Poe’s contemporaries and other long-dead writers and artists will pay their respects, reading eulogies adapted from their writings about Poe.

Sadly, there are no plans to exhume Poe's body. (One suspects he wouldn't have minded.) Instead a special effects artist has created a lifelike (or, uh, deathlike) Poe dummy that will stand in for the late author.

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