When half the people of his land had died, he called to him a thousand healthy, happy friends, and with them went far away to live in one of his palaces. And the sickness lasted, from beginning to the end, no more than half an hour.īut Prospero, the ruler of that land, was happy and strong and wise. The bright red spots upon the body and especially upon the face of the sick man made other men turn away from him, afraid to try to help. Then there was bleeding through the skin, though it was not cut or broken - and then, death! There were sharp pains, and a sudden feeling that the mind was rushing in circles inside the head. Blood was its mark - the redness and the horror of blood. No sickness had ever been so deadly - so great a killer - or so fearful to see. The Red Death had long been feeding on the country. The story was originally adapted and recorded by the U.S. “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.We present the short story "The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allen Poe. Halloween, of course, is a suitably gothic time to start quoting Poe, although we'd argue a little Poe-try never goes amiss whatever the weather. The Raven has inspired works from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to Stephen King's Insomnia Neil Gaiman, Lemony Snickett and Joan Aitken are among the coterie of authors – let alone film directors, musicians and artists – to have reflected Poe's work in their own. In spite, or perhaps because of, this, Poe's literary reputation has remained intact for nearly 200 years. Variously attributed to alcoholism, substance abuse, disease and suicide, what is known are the storied facts: he was discovered, wearing someone else's clothes, lying in a gutter, and died a few hours later. He was barely 40 when he died, in circumstances so mysterious his cause of death remains unknown.
Poe was also the first prominent American author to exist financially through his writing alone, although times were frequently hard.
Orphaned by the time he was a toddler, he was 25 when he married his 13-year-old cousin, who subsequently died of tuberculosis. The author of The Raven – an epic poem in which a man is visited by a talking raven and descends into madness – lived a life as macabre and gothic as his work.
Few authors have commanded such an eerie reputation as Edgar Allan Poe.
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