Description
A reissue of Calvin Trillin's memoir of his relationship with a brilliant but tragic Yale classmate that is also a rumination on social change in the 1950s and 1960s
Remembering Denny is perhaps Calvin Trillin's most inspired and powerful book: a memoir of a friendship, a work of investigative reporting, and an exploration of a country and a time that captures something essential about how America has changed since Trillin--and Denny Hansen--were graduated from Yale in 1957. Roger Denny Hansen had seemed then a college hero for the ages: a charmer with a dazzling smile, the subject of a feature in Life magazine, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a varsity swimmer, a Rhodes scholar...perhaps a future president, as his friends only half-joked. But after early jobs in government and journalism, Hansen's life increasingly took a downward turn and he gradually lost touch with family and old friends before eventually committing suicide--an obscure, embittered, pain-racked professor--in 1991. In contemplating his friend's life, Calvin Trillin considers questions both large and small--what part does the pressure of high expectations place on even the most gifted, how difficult might it have been to be a closeted homosexual in the unyielding world of the 1960s Foreign Service, how much responsibility does the individual bear for all that happens in his life--in a book that is also a meditation on our country's evolving sense of itself.Author: Calvin Trillin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 05/16/2005
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780374529741
ISBN10: 0374529744
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
About the Author
Calvin Trillin is the author of more than twenty books, including Family Man (FSG) and Messages from My Father (FSG). He writes a weekly column for Time and a weekly poem for The Nation. He lives in New York City.
This title is not returnable