For information on the death metal band, see Obituary (band).

An obituary is a notice of the death of a person, usually published in a newspaper, written or commissioned by the newspaper, and usually including a short biography. It is similar to a funeral notice, which is also published on the obituary page. A funeral notice is a paid advertisement written by family members, placed in the newspaper by the funeral home.

Writing obituaries

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Because of the short time between the notification of a death and the next publication deadline, most newspapers have one or more clerks who specialize in typing such things as obituaries. Sometimes, this task is given to a cub reporter (often to allow an editor to evaluate writing and copyreading skills), although today many obituary clerks also have other duties (such as typing news releases and social news).

More on [ Obituary ]

The Economist: Obituary

Alan Peters
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:01:12 -0000
Alan Peters, furniture-maker, died on October 11th, aged 76REACHING blearily, in the morning, for a pair of socks, few people give a thought to the smooth running of a drawer. But to Alan Peters, who for many years was probably Britain’s best furniture-maker, a properly fitted and functioning drawer was the acme of his craft. A perfect drawer, he would say, had to slide in on a cushion of air, and when pulled out had to cause the other drawers to retract, very slightly, into the almost airtight case. It must show no hint of “slop” from top to bottom or side to side. The front must fit into the opening like a plug, with no light or gaps visible. All very well to say; but Mr Peters, true to the Arts and Crafts Movement in which he had been trained, was working with “timber rather than walking sticks”, in William Morris’s phrase. Solid wood moved: it faded in sunlight, swelled in humidity, dried out in central heating, in constant sympathy with its surroundings. In Mr Peters’s hands it adjusted to the user, too: to sit in one of his chairs was to feel the back give a little, graciously, as if “it wants you to”. Wood moved slowly, but not equally, with its mixture of springwood and summerwood, straight and wavy grain, knots, rings and imperfections. And it would always go the way it was naturally inclined. ...
Richard Sonnenfeldt
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:53:57 -0000
Richard Sonnenfeldt, chief interpreter at Nuremberg, died on October 9th, aged 86HE HAS almost been cropped from the photograph, and his name is a blank in the key. An interpreter’s lot, perhaps. But there on the extreme left, legs crossed, with his long, intent nose and his immature moustache (he is 22, young for such work), sits Richard Sonnenfeldt. His fingers are hooked softly round the table-end, like a cat about to pounce. The setting is Room Number One in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, the time the summer of 1945. Beside him, past the stenographer, is Colonel John Amen, the chief pre-trial interrogator for the tribunal that will put Hitler’s henchmen on trial for war crimes. Opposite him, placed directly in the window light, is Rudolf Hess. Hess, who flew an abortive “peace mission” to England in 1941, is already “the original lunatic” to Mr Sonnenfeldt. The pockets of his greatcoat are filled with scraps of food brought from England, the proof, he says, that the British tried to poison him. He is playing the amnesiac, remembering nothing of his career. But Mr Sonnenfeldt will catch Hess out when he uses Kladde, a student word for a folder, and then quickly says he doesn’t know why. Teenage slang, said Mr Sonnenfeldt firmly, “could hardly be the vocabulary word of an amnesiac.” ...
Ludovic Kennedy
Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:43:09 -0000
Ludovic Kennedy, writer, broadcaster and campaigner, died on October 18th, aged 89“ESSENTIALLY a communicator” was the way Sir Ludovic Kennedy described himself. A Scottish “lad o’ pairts” might have been a better term. Not only did he have prodigious talents as a writer and broadcaster, but he used them to the full. If his manner was relaxed, his questioning courteous and his bearing almost patrician, he was no dilettante. The amiability and easy charm merely helped to disguise both his professionalism and the zeal that burned within him. In nothing was that zeal more apparent than in his lifelong concern with miscarriages of justice. This, he thought, was planted in his mind in early childhood by meeting a prison visitor who consorted with the wicked inmates of Bedford jail. It was surely strengthened when he later learnt of the career-breaking court-martial of his adored father, a naval captain, in 1921. By talking to his men, rather than using force against them, Captain Kennedy had averted a mutiny but was nonetheless censured and denied a new command. ...
Reinhard Mohn
Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:48:53 -0000
Reinhard Mohn, German media magnate, died on October 3rd, aged 88CAPITALISM red in tooth and claw never seemed to appeal to Reinhard Mohn. Asked to write an essay entitled “My Thoughts on Choosing a Profession”, the 16-year-old schoolboy dwelt on his obligations to society, his natural abilities and the desire for a useful life. These concerns, he said, were to stay with him throughout his career. Indeed “co-operation and compassionate leadership” were the key to his success. And success he surely found. Not long before he died, his family-owned company, Bertelsmann, was the world’s sixth-biggest media group, with over 100,000 employees in 50-odd countries.Bertelsmann had been founded in 1835, as a publisher and printer of religious books. It was, and still is, based in Gutersloh, a dozy town in eastern Westphalia, where Mr Mohn’s great-great-grandfather, Carl Bertelsmann, was a Protestant lithographer. The firm prospered until the great Weimar inflation cut its workforce from 84 to six in 1921-23. But it bounced back, and was employing 440 people in 1939. Then it did even better, producing quantities of Nazi novels and propaganda. When Mr Mohn came home from the war, though, the buildings had been bombed, so the young would-be engineer persuaded by his father to join the family firm was hardly taking on a thriving business. ...
Marek Edelman
Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:47:29 -0000
Marek Edelman, the last military commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, died on October 2nd, aged 90HE WAS sure that once he started fighting, he was going to die. No point in being scared about it. Death was death; there was nothing more, nothing bigger, that could happen to him. At least in this way, taking up arms, he could die on his own terms rather than theirs. His time, his place. Suicide would have been another way to do it, but he never considered that. Going to the gas chamber or the mass grave with quiet, considered dignity, like many of the residents of the Warsaw ghetto, was another way: far more admirable and more difficult, he thought, than running through random bullets as he did. But it was not for him. Only by dying as publicly as possible, loudly and with his gun blazing, could he let the world know what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in Poland. The odds were overwhelming. He was deputy commander of 220 untrained “boys” with pistols and home-made explosives. Against them were around 2,000 Nazi soldiers, the pick of the Wehrmacht, with plenty more behind them. The Nazis had come on the eve of Passover, April 19th 1943, to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, from which they had been deporting 6,000 Jews a week to the death camps. For almost a month Mr Edelman helped keep them at bay, barricaded in the streets around the brushmakers’ district until the whole place was burned down round him. ...
William Safire
Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:04:22 -0000
William Safire, pundit and lexicographer, died on September 27th, aged 79HAD William Safire written his own obituary, he would have laid down a few simple rules. First, use the active, not the passive voice, no matter how inert the corpse. Second, taking the bull by the hand, nix those mixed metaphors. Third, kill all sentences starting with conjunctions, or ending in “by”, “with”, or “on”. De mortuis nil nisi bonum? Preferably not; swaydo-intellectual Latinisms cut no ice with him, unless he allowed himself a silkily Catulline ave atque vale. As a practised scribbler—never truly a hack, for that word, borrowed from England, denoted a broken-down horse let out for hire—he also knew better than to squander a good nugget in the lede. Not until halfway through his article would grieving readers learn, for example, that he used to buy the unknown Ariel Sharon breakfast each time he came to New York; that Barbara Bush would wink at him on grand occasions, while her husband froze him out; or that he once wrote a spoof interview with Richard Nixon languishing in purgatory, his entry into heaven having been delayed because…he had imposed wage and price controls. ...

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