Every chapter in “The Violet Hour,’’ Katie Roiphie’s intimate and intense examination of how five writers faced their deaths, begins with a photograph. In each case — Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak — it’s an image not of a writer but of a room filled with their books. The image supports what we learn as we read about these artists: It was in their workrooms that they really lived. As Roiphe reveals in these capsule biographies, their desire to go on writing to the end was inseparable from their desire to go on living.

Roiphe begins with her own experience of a critical lung infection she suffered at 12 that brought her to the brink of death, and she explains, “This is when I start writing this book.’’ Her father’s more recent death from a heart attack in the lobby of his apartment building also haunts her. She explains her motivation, writing, “I think if I can capture death on the page, I’ll repair or heal something. I’ll feel better. It comes down to that.’’ With this in mind, she chose writers “who can put the confrontation with mortality into words . . . in a way that most of us can’t or won’t.’’

“We cannot observe our own death,’’ Freud wrote. So Roiphe gave herself the task of doing it for them, drawing on the words and memories and recollections of friends and family they left behind. Roiphe’s deep immersion in their writing and art leads her to find areas of commonality in their perspectives on death. Sendak called it a “nowhere’’ or “that blankness’’ and imagined IT as white. Updike, too, called it a “ghastly blank’’ but imagined as gray.

Roiphe notes that both Updike and Dylan Thomas turned to sex as an antidote. In the last days before he died and in terrible health, Thomas was not only cheating on his wife with a mistress but stealing upstairs with the hostess at a party so he could cheat on his mistress, too. “I was again alive,’’ wrote Updike of his own extramarital affairs, “in that moment of constant present emergency in which animals healthily live.’’

For Sendak and Freud, it was the vitality of the mind — of creativity — they recognized as the life force. “I want to be alone and work until the day my head hits the drawing table and I’m dead,’’ Sendak told an interviewer. “Kaput.’’ Freud refused to take painkillers despite the agony of a cancer that had eaten a hole through his cheek because of his desire to remain lucid and able to work until the very end. “I have one wholly secret entreaty,’’ he wrote to a friend, “no . . . paralysis of one’s powers through bodily misery. Let us die in harness, as King Macbeth says.’’ As James Salter, whose interview provides the book’s epilogue, put it: “Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.’’

Sontag alone refused to accept the inevitability of death. She described herself as “gleaming with survivorship’’ after surviving a first battle with cancer and that victory became essential to her self-regard even as she endured suffering that sent the people around her into despair. She told her doctor “she didn’t care about ‘quality of life,’ ’’ Roiphe writes. “She cared about life.’’ As painful as it was to watch, her son, David Rieff, believed that “she [had] a right to her own death.’’

Roiphe makes no judgments about the choices made by these writers and that is one of the book’s many virtues. She is willing to report the truth as her subjects experienced and expressed it. She admits that she questioned her own motives at times, but readers will not: This is a beautiful and thoughtful book. “I don’t believe that you can learn how to die, or gain wisdom, or prepare,’’ she admits. “[B]ut I do think you can look at a death and be less afraid.’’ “The Violet Hour’’ may help others do the same.

THE VIOLET HOUR:

Great Writers at the End

By Katie Roiphe

Dial, 320 pp., $28

Buzzy Jackson is a historian and the author of “The Inspirational Atheist: Wise Words on the Wonder and Meaning of Life.’’ AskBuzzy@gmail.com