An exploration of the relationship between literature and life, this study examines the effect on readers of "suicidal literature"--novels and poems that depict, and sometimes glorify, the act of suicide. Beginning with a discussion of the growing incidence of suicide in American culture, Jeffrey Berman investigates the portrayal of suicide in the works of four authors who later took their own lives--Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath,...