Jessica Mitford, who earned the title "Queen of the Muckrakers" for a book that accused the undertaker business of committing an "expensive practical joke" on the public, has died at age 78.
Mitford died of lung cancer Tuesday at her Oakland home.Known as a witty polemicist, Mitford's crusades over more than three decades included criticizing doctors for performing too many Caesarean sections and chronicling a brutal prison system.
"The American Way of Death," which she wrote in 1963, poked fun at the funeral industry's euphemisms to get more money from grieving families. Coffins, she wrote, had become "caskets," hearses were called "professional cars" and undertakers referred to themselves as "morticians" and "funeral directors."
The book led to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and earned Mitford the title "Queen of the Muckrakers" as well as charges of anti-Americanism from a Republican congressman and the funeral industry.
Mitford was born Sept. 11, 1917, in Gloucestershire, England.
When she was 20, she left to fight in the Spanish Civil War as a Communist with her first husband. He was killed in 1941.
Mitford moved to the United States in 1939 and married lawyer Robert Treuhaft.
Mitford turned to writing after losing her job at the San Francisco Chronicle's classified department when the FBI investigated her.