"The Antiquary's Last Will and Testament" from The English Dance of Death, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1814.

Preamble

Memento Mori

By Lewis H. Lapham

Learning how to die, as Michel de Montaigne once rightly said, is the unlearning of how to be a slave.

Fond Farewells

By Bess Lovejoy

Jessica Mitford’s An American Way of Death took down an industry few people knew about, but that everyone would one day need.

Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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Miscellany

On June 4, 1827, Hector Berlioz wrote to his sister Nancy about James Fenimore Cooper’s recently published novel The Prairie, in which the protagonist of Cooper’s Leatherstocking series, Natty Bumppo, is killed off. “I devoured it straight off,” Berlioz stated. “I reached the end at seven in the evening, and was still at the foot of one of the columns of the Pantheon in tears at eleven o’clock!”

Voices In Time

1862 | Virginia

Eve of Battle

Clara Barton reports from the frontline.More

Voices In Time

1833 | London

One or Two Heartbreakers

Some goodbyes are harder than others.More

Voices In Time

1623 | London

Involved in Mankind

For John Donne, no man is an island.More

Charts & Graphs

Reanimators

Techniques for returning from the land of the dead.

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Black and white photograph of scholar, novelist, and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.

Black and white photograph of American Red Cross founder Clara Barton.

Black and white photograph of Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

Black and white photograph of poet, diplomat, and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson.

Contributors

Sculpture bust of Greek dramatist Euripides.

Sculpture bust of Greek historian Herodotus.

Black and white of Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas.

Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1665

Black and white photograph of English writer Virginia Woolf.

Black and white photograph of French writer and film director Marguerite Duras.

Conversations

Virginia Woolf & Marguerite Duras

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Death

1862 | Virginia

1833 | London

1623 | London