| Remembering Denny Contributor(s): Trillin, Calvin (Author), Dunne, John Gregory (Afterword by) |
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ISBN: 0374529744 ISBN-13: 9780374529741 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux OUR PRICE: $16.20 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 2005 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - Biography & Autobiography | Lgbt |
| Dewey: B |
| LCCN: 2004062608 |
| Series: FSG Classics |
| Physical Information: 0.6" H x 5.5" W x 8.2" (0.50 lbs) 240 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - New England |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Trillin, Calvin: - Calvin Trillin is the author of many 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. |