"Probably the Best-Known Book about Death Published in the Twentieth Century"

"The book arrived at a time when the taboo on death was just starting to ease. For much of the early twentieth century, death was spoken of in hushed voices, when it was spoken of at all. Numerous scholars have since discussed the cloaking of death in the Western world, its transition from a ubiquitous and semi-public event to something shameful and hidden, best left to medical experts and technical specialists (like the new professional class of funeral directors). Rising industrialization and urbanization in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries helped push the graveyard out of town, and these shifts coincided with the rise of a new reserve, in which displays of strong emotion, such as grief, were unseemly.
"But during the 1950s, the landscape changed. In 1955, Geoffrey Gorer’s fascinating essay 'The Pornography of Death,' argued that proscriptions around death had replaced the Victorian taboo against sex. In 1959, psychologist Herman Feifel came out with The Meaning of Death, a collection of essays often credited with singlehandedly establishing death, dying, and bereavement as legitimate areas for study. Yet neither Feifel nor Gorer made their way to American dinner tables. It was Mitford who got ordinary people talking."

Bess Lovejoy in Lapham's Quarterly marks the fiftieth anniversary of Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death.