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Updated: June 3, 2025
I sha'n't have to worry about obituaries, but I bet you dollars to doughnuts some people will wake up some morning worrying a whole lot about editorials. Mayne people like to think they think what they think themselves. They don't. They think what their home newspapers tell them to think. And this is your great big chance to get the town ear and shout into it good and loud."
That part of the literary histories which treats of the dead waste and middle of the eighteenth century reads like a collection of obituaries, and were better reduced to the conciseness of epitaph, though the authors of them seem to find a melancholy pleasure, much like that of undertakers, in the task by which they live. Gottsched reigned supreme on the legitimate throne of dulness.
It is my desire to leave these Amended Obituaries neatly bound behind me as a perennial consolation and entertainment to my family, and as an heirloom which shall have a mournful but definite commercial value for my remote posterity. Yours very respectfully. Mark Twain.
"I have heard of you from Mr. Hunter. And so you collect butterflies! Very interesting and active occupation for any one that ahem! likes that sort of thing. Very." "He collects obituaries, too," said Hunter, immensely amused. "You mustn't overlook the obituaries, Mr. Inglesby." Mr. Inglesby favored the collector of butterflies and obituaries with another speculative, piglike stare.
The indicated obituaries followed. "Well, at any rate, they didn't murder him for it." "The son now, a chip of the old block, eh?" "Nothing of the kind, a quiet young prig." "The papers say " "Damn the papers, they never know anything." "You mean they don't print what they do know." "I mean they don't give us the woman. For it was a woman. I'll eat my hat it was a woman."
The Annals of the Four Masters give 'the years of foundations and destructions of churches and castles, the obituaries of remarkable persons, the inaugurations of kings, the battles of chiefs, the contests of clans, the ages of bards, abbots, bishops, &c. Through other divisions of this mass of materials, the books of pedigrees and genealogies, the martyrologies and festologies, such as the Felire of Angus the Culdee, the topographical tracts, such as the Dinnsenchas, we touch 'the most ancient traditions of the Irish, traditions which were committed to writing at a period when the ancient customs of the people were unbroken. We touch 'the early history of Ireland, civil and ecclesiastical. We get 'the origin and history of the countless monuments of Ireland, of the ruined church and tower, the sculptured cross, the holy well, and the commemorative name of almost every townland and parish in the whole island. We get, in short, 'the most detailed information upon almost every part of ancient Gaelic life, a vast quantity of valuable details of life and manners.
But he found no such name or event in the obituaries; and he was only the more amused by his friend Belch's futile efforts at circumvention and control. "My dear Belch," he replied, after he had made his investigations, "I have your private note, but I have not yet encountered the superb Delilah; nor have I forgotten what you said to me about working 'em through their wives, and sisters, etc.
"I'm not telling you to buy anything. I'm only thinking of the obituaries. Ask the parson. I'm I'm addicted to 'em, like some people are to booze. But if you'd promise to keep open the old corner for them, why, I might come out and beg you to buy the Clarion, now it's going so cheap. Yep all on account of the obituaries!"
There was a man in Tennessee, just before the war, who had a printed circular, with a blank for the author's name; and I know of one author who replied to him with a printed note, and a printed address on the envelope, not a word of manuscript about it! Next in frequency are the applications for private literary contributions, such as epithalamia, obituaries, addresses for lovers, and the like.
A cynical Frenchman has defined life as the collection of recollections for the time when you shall have no memory. Just as there are many persons of whose existence you are unaware till you read their obituaries, so there are many of whose celebrity you are ignorant till you see the advertisement of their biographies. On all sides we are flooded with big books about little people.
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