SOURCE: "Death and Black Humor," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1975, pp. 5-40.

In the following essay, LeClair discovers continuities in the presentation of death in the works of such black humor writers as J. P. Donleavy, Joseph Heller, John Barth, John Hawkes, Walker Percy, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Thomas Pynchon; he additionally studies the sociological implications of these author's comical representations of death.

That Black Humor has become a fit subject for the literary historian as well as the literary anatomist is demonstrated by the recent publication of three books—Charles B. Harris's Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd, Raymond M. Olderman's Beyond the Waste Land, and Max F. Schulz's Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties—which advance theories about the cultural causes of Black Humor.¹ Harris, Olderman, and Schulz rightly emphasize social dissonances and intellectual uncertainties as stimuli for the novelists they discuss, but...