"The Masque of the Red Death," was written by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809. Edgar Allan Poe had an excessively agonizing life[ CITATION Lyb15 l 1033 ]. His father left when he was about one and his mother died from tuberculosis when he was only two years of age. Poe was taken in by John and Francis Allan, this is the origin of his middle name. Poe's foster parents sent him to very good schools and eventually he attended the University of Virginia[ CITATION Lyb15 l 1033 ]. Though Edgar Allan Poe excelled in his studies at the University of Virginia, he was forced to leave after less than a year due to gambling debts that John Allan refused to pay. After leaving college, Poe enlisted in the army. After his stint in the Army, Poe attended the United States Military Academy[ CITATION Lyb15 l 1033 ]. However, he was yet again forced to discontinue his studies for financial reasons. As a young man, Poe had a continuous struggle over money with John Allan, his foster father, and developed habits of alcoholism and debt. In 1829, Francis Allan, his foster mother, died from tuberculosis[ CITATION Lyb15 l 1033 ]. He was overwhelmed with grief, much the same as he had undergone as a very young child when tuberculosis took his birth mother. In 1836, Edgar Allen Poe married his thirteen year old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Tragically, Virginia died in 1847 of tuberculosis[ CITATION Lyb15 l 1033 ]. Virginia was the third important woman in his life to die of tuberculosis. All of these events in his life worsened his struggle with alcoholism and depression and are the origin of his macabre writings. More importantly, they are the influences for the writing of "The Masque of the Red Death". In "The Masque of the Red Death", Poe's theme is that death escapes no one.
In the beginning, Poe uses color as symbolism for different stages of the life of the character Prince Prospero, to establish the theme of the story[ CITATION The64 l 1033 ].
