The Dead Toreador, by Édouard Manet, c. 1864. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

The Dead Toreador, by Édouard Manet, c. 1864. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Death

Volume VI, Number 4 | fall 2013

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"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.

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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.

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Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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Miscellany

The inhabitants of Eyam, Derbyshire, initiated a quarantine to control a Black Death outbreak in 1665—for fourteen months, no one was allowed into or out of the town. Only a quarter of the citizens survived. One local farmer, Elizabeth Hancock, was forced to bury her husband, along with six of her seven children, over an eight-day period in August 1666.

1836 | London

In the Name of Love

In one long yellow string I wound, three times her little throat around.More

1926 | New York City

Receiving the Summons

She is not dead, she’s resting in the bosom of Jesus.More

c. 58 BC | Egypt

The Fable of Hell

Diodorus Siculus observes an Egyptian funeral.More

Charts & Graphs

Tales of the Crypts

Fabulous final resting places.

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Black and white engraving of Roman author Petronius.

Black and white image of Greek biographer and writer Plutarch.

American writer Barbara Lazear Ascher.

Black and white image of German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist.

Photograph of American short-story writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe.

Color portrait of English poet John Donne.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

—Iris Murdoch, 1974

Painted portrait of Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Color photograph of American physician Jack Kevorkian.

David Hume & Jack Kevorkian

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