Surviving Literary Suicide

An exploration of the relationship between literature and life, this study examines the effect on readers of "suicidal literature" -- novels and poems that depict, and sometimes glorify, the act of suicide. Beginning with a discussion of the growing incidence of suicide in American culture, Jeffrey Berman investigates the portrayal of suicide in the works of four authors who later took their own lives -- Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton -- and two who did not -- Kate Chopin and William Styron. In each case Berman discusses the writer's shifting attitude toward suicide, the tendency of critics to romanticize fictional suicide, and the impact of writing about suicide on the artist's own life.