Edgar Allan Poe was an excellent writer from the 1800's. Poe lived a tragic life full of death and depression. In his life he would end up losing his mother, his stepmother, and his young wife. This caused Poe to mire into himself and become depressed. He would show this depression in most if not all of his writings. It is this that made Poe's writings the masterpieces of gothic writing that they are. Poe was so consumed by this depression that he would write about death almost obsessively.
             In this first story "The Masque of the Red death" a prince tries to hide from a horrific diesis that has over run his town. "No pestilence had ever been so fatal or so hideous." Poe's life was full of deaths by dieses like his wife's and both his mother's. They all died of a horrible death that Poe had to live with. "And darkness and the Red Death held illimitable domain over all." This goes right along with Poe's life in which the diesis had control over his loved ones and took them from him.
             In the second story "The Black Cat" a man comes home one night drunk, because he had just lost his job, and sees the cat. He grabs the cat and in scaring it the cat bites him, driving the man to cut one of the cat's eyes out. "One morning in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree." This statement by Poe shows that the deaths of his loved ones gave no mercy to him. "I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain." This shows how Poe was so sunk into his depression that it seems that he is like the character and is trying to blame his wife's death on himself, like he "buried the axe in her head" or that he could not save her from her tragic death by tuberculoses.
             In the last story "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" a rich women and her daughter are killed by a crazed gorilla ...