Born in Boston, Massachusetts in the year 1809, Edgar Allan Poe led an eventful yet brief life in which he mastered the art of morbid writing. His first work, Tamerlane and Other Poems, came at the age of eighteen, but his writing eventually developed into the refined writing style that enabled him to succeed with his most famous work, The Raven. However, Poe’s successful writing career arose from a melancholy life involving the loss of parental figures, financial issues and even a tragic love life. The traumatic series of events that Edgar Allan Poe experienced in all of these areas inspire the dismal tone in his literary works, such as “The Masque of the Red Death.” Edgar Allan Poe experienced many losses of important figures in his life that began at a time even he himself may not remember. When Edgar was only “three years of age, his father had mysteriously disappeared from the scene, and Elizabeth Poe [his mother] was on her …show more content…
Shortly after returning home from the University of Virginia, Poe “[faced] another personal setback—his neighbor and fiancée Sarah Elmira Royster had become engaged to someone else,” leaving Poe “heartbroken and frustrated.” The betrayal of his fiancée gives Poe so much pain and sorrow that he uses it to master a ghastly writing style. Towards the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s days, he “was overcome by grief after the death of his beloved [wife] Virginia in 1847.” In “The Masque of the Red Death,” the feelings of “disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust” that the guests feel when they notice the masked figure compares to the same feeling of shock and revulsion felt by Poe after losing his love interests. Just as a songwriter may write a sorrowful song after an ended relationship, Edgar Allan Poe wrote tragic and gloomy stories to cope with the betrayal of his fiancée or loss of his