Death of the authors

Oscar Moore told of his experience as a person with AIDS in a monthly UK newspaper column. Harold Brodkey wrote in the New Yorker of the time after his AIDS diagnosis; he called this writing "the story of my death". Both authors died in 1996. This article starts with a reading of their chronicled and public dying. It then follows these authors in considering the prescient links between sex and death. Moore and Brodkey are not the only people who have written of their dying in the press and in books. The article considers the prominence of such accounts and considers the reflexive relationship between autobiography, dying, grief and social change.