How Does The Masque Of Death Affect Poe's Life

Edgar Allan Poe was an author, poet, and literary critic, whose works weren’t very successful during his lifetime but are now read around the world. His stories often included dark themes, and “the atmosphere in his tales of horror [was] unrivaled in American fiction.” (“Edgar Allan Poe Biography”) He was also very revolutionary in his multiple fields, as many sources credit Poe as the “architect” of the modern short story, as well as the “Father of the Detective Story”. But Poe’s life was not always happy, he lived and died a depressed alcoholic, which is why very few of his writings had happy endings. The work of Edgar Allan Poe was greatly influenced by the events in his life, as one can see that he experienced death of loved ones, had difficulty going through the processes of mourning and loss, and had frequent bouts of depression and alcoholism.
He experienced death early in his life, when his mother, the actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe, died when he was 2 years old. This is echoed in stories where people died horrible deaths from disease, such as Masque of the Red Death. In his most famous work, The Raven, Poe explores the themes of death and loss, specifically the loss of a spouse. Poe writes in Masque of the Red Death, “He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died and died each in the despairing posture of his fall”. That quote itself came at the end of the story, as similar statements come at the end of other works of Poe, and it shows that death can often be unexpected. Therefore, with this small sentence, the tone of the whole story changes from a tale about a prince holding a party to escape a disease, to a gruesome account of death that makes The Hunger Games look like