The Undertaker's Garland

About this book

Death is an inexhaustible subject for comedy, and Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop approach it with a thoroughly dark sense of humour.

The Undertaker's Garland gathers poems, dialogues and brief prose pieces that turn funerary conventions and mortal anxiety into literary play. Boris Artzybasheff's strange, witty illustrations give the book a visual personality all its own. Published in 1922, it captures two young writers testing the boundary between the solemn and the absurd, with mortality always somewhere in the room.