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

Purchase

"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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The Afternoon Meal, by Luis Meléndez, c. 1772

Last Meals

By Brent Cunningham

The choice of the final meal contains a curious paradox: why mark the end of a life with the stuff that fuels it?

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Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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Miscellany

Sherwood Anderson died in 1941 of peritonitis, having swallowed a toothpick at a party. He was sixty-four. Tennessee Williams choked to death on a plastic eye-drop cap at a hotel in 1983. He was seventy-one.

1918 | Yekaterinburg

Between Method and Execution

Disposing of the Romanovs. More

1927 | Charlestown, MA

The Day Will Come

Bartolomeo Vanzetti goes on the record.More

1889 | New York City

Mistakes Were Made

A guide to avoiding premature burial. More

Charts & Graphs

Spoiler Alert

Murders, accidents, and suicides from novels and films.

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Black and white photograph of Emily Dickinson sitting next to a desk.

Photograph of American author and editor Bess Lovejoy.

Black and white photograph of English poet Robert Browning seated.

Black and white photograph of English writer and critic Lytton Strachey.

Sculpture bust of Greek dramatist Euripides.

Color photograph of American physician Jack Kevorkian.

Detail of mural featuring Jacobus de Voragine, archbishop of Genoa and chronicler.

Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

—Horace Walpole, 1784

Painted portrait of Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Color photograph of American physician Jack Kevorkian.

David Hume & Jack Kevorkian

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

The World in Time

Robert D. Kaplan

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More

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