Remembering Denny [Paperback]

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 Dennyis 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 inLifemagazine, 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.

Fascinating . . . A fine meditation on one life's aborted promise, the crippling burden of anticipated success, and the mysteries of the human heart. Kirkus ReviewsCalvin Trillinis the author of more than twenty books, includingFamily Man(FSG) andMessages from My Father(FSG). He writes a weekly column forTimeand a weekly poem forThe Nation. He lives in New York City.