El gat negre és un dels grans clàssics de la literatura de terror. Però, de fet, hi ha pocs contes d'Edgar Allan Poe que no puguin rebre aquesta consideració i aquest volum us ofereix les narracions més emblemàtiques del geni nord-americà. Endinseu-vos en l'obscur món en què els gats negres són quelcom més sinistre que una mascota, descobriu el misteri espectral que s'amaga en els ulls de l'enigmàtica lady Ligeia, escolteu com batega el cor d'un difunt... El gat negre i altres contes et convida a fer el primer pas vers el món narratiu de Poe. Els qui no s'han submergit mai en el seu terrorífic univers trobaran en aquesta antologia una porta oberta a un món obscur i misteriós. Vols travessar-la?
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.