The American Way of Death

The American Way of Death is a 1963 book by Jessica Mitford that critically examines the funeral industry in the United States. Mitford, an English-born writer and journalist, investigated various aspects of American society with a witty and irreverent style.1

The book exposes what Mitford saw as unscrupulous practices within the funeral industry, highlighting how undertakers, or "morticians," and coffins, or "caskets," became part of a burgeoning "death industry". It satirizes the commercialization of death and the shift from dying at home among family to dying in hospitals, a change influenced by modern medicine and technology. Mitford's work became a bestseller, offering a caustic look at how death was handled in America.12