(For more on Poe and Griswold, click here.) Still, much of Poe's short life is a mystery, and we just have to accept that fact. Letters to Poe, as well as things written about him are also taken into account by scholars looking to provide a more balanced view of the man. While we can never really know Poe, his letters, essays, and reviews speak for themselves. How, you might be wondering, do we know Griswold is stretching the truth and making stuff up? The evidence, of course.
Griswold distorted and sensationalized Poe's life and had a large part in creating a fictionalized Poe. When Poe died at age 40 in 1849, Griswold became Poe's self-declared biographer. (Yes, that was his real name.) In any case, the two men had a complicated and not altogether friendly relationship. If Poe wasn't a creep, you might be wondering, how did he get that reputation? Well, he was involved professionally with a man named Rufus Wilmot Griswold. He seemed to have loving relationship with his wife, and is reported to have been a cat lover ( source). This mystery is part of what has kept "The Black Cat" in circulation for over a 160 years.īecause Edgar Allan Poe is such a fascinating person, and has a popular reputation as a creepy guy, some readers are tempted to imagine that Poe and his narrators are one in the same. As is often the case with real life murderers, we can't pinpoint exactly why he went out of control. It's the death-row confession of nameless man who destroys himself, his wife, and his pets. Stripped to bare bones, it's a story about domestic violence and brutal murder. Like many news stories, "The Black Cat" can be a downer. Gruesome news items were just as popular in Poe's time as they are in ours. This lurid tale reads like something right out of the headlines – bizarre headlines to be sure. We think a newspaper is a perfect place for it. It was first printed on August 19, 1843, in the Philadelphia edition of a newspaper called the United States Saturday Post. " The Black Cat" is a famous short story from horror-master Edgar Allan Poe.
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