Many of Edgar Allen Poe’s works had gruesome, nauseating murders. The murderous thoughts he had, often committed by a man with signs of a mental instability, seem to be related to how Poe was surrounded by death. Poe felt inner rage in his stories because of the different events in his life. His birth mother, his foster mother, and his wife/cousin, Virginia, all died of tuberculosis. These deaths made him angry at the world, life kept taking away his happiness/family. Especially since these were women who loved him, and Poe thought women were special (Whisker 1). Poe went along to write a story on tuberculosis, The Mask of the Red Death. Poe notes that “THE ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or
