Portraits of Grief

In the summer of 2002, Times Books published a volume containing the 1,910 “Portraits of Grief” that had appeared in the New York Times between September 15 and December 31, 2001. The 1,910 stories that readers had consumed in the newspaper along with their daily breakfast or their morning commute were now compiled into a manageable archive and filed in alphabetical order. Rescued from the ephemera of the daily paper and the fluctuations of the Internet, the “Portraits” finally came to rest between hard covers. ¹ In the prefatory material to the volume, editors and reporters characterize the work they did in creating this popular and much-remarked-on journalism. Their commentary both describes how the genre came into being and provides a frame through which the “Portraits” should be read.