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.

c. 1573 | Aquitaine

Living at Life’s Expense

Montaigne considers death and life.More

1623 | London

Involved in Mankind

For John Donne, no man is an island.More

1842 | Philadelphia

Plague Party

Edgar Allan Poe welcomes Death to the party.More

Charts & Graphs

Average Life Expectancy

Will you live longer than a Founding Father or a wife of Henry VIII?

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Black and white photograph of English writer Virginia Woolf.

Black and white image of Greek biographer and writer Plutarch.

Painted portrait of English physician and author Thomas Browne.

Black and white photograph of American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath.

Black and white photograph of American writer James Agee.

Black and white of Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas.

Black and white of photograph of American writer Michael Herr standing.

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

—St. Paul, c. 50

Black and white photograph of English writer Virginia Woolf.

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

Virginia Woolf & Marguerite Duras

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