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While a plague called the Red Death empties his country, Prince Prospero shuts himself away with a thousand knights and ladies in a fortified abbey, determined to enjoy himself. Six months later he gives a masked ball in a suite of seven rooms, each decorated in a single colour; the last is black, lit through blood-red windows, and holds a great ebony clock whose chimes stop the dancers cold. At midnight, a new guest appears.
Context and significance
Published in 1842, the tale is a short, dreamlike allegory about the impossibility of escaping death, and it has been read anew in every age of epidemics. Its colours and rhythms show Poe's skill as a poet in prose. Read it with The Cask of Amontillado.
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was born in Boston to travelling actors and orphaned before he was three. Raised by a Richmond merchant who later disowned him, he lived by his pen as a poet, critic and magazine editor, always short of money. His young wife Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847, and two years later Poe was found delirious in Baltimore and died days later, in circumstances that are still a mystery.
He made the short story an art of total effect, wrote tales of terror such as The Fall of the House of Usher, invented the detective story with 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and wrote 'The Raven', one of the most famous poems in English. French poets led by Baudelaire honoured him before America did.