Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0374226075, Hardcover)

Everybody idolized Denny Hansen. He was a varsity swimmer and a Rhodes Scholar whose "million-dollar smile" and bright future made him the subject of a feature in Life magazine. A clean-cut college hero filled with limitless promise, Denny symbolized everything thought of as good in 1950s America. But life worked out differently for Denny. By middle age he was alone and unfulfilled: he committed suicide at fifty-five.

In REMEMBERING DENNY, essayist and poet Calvin Trillin investigates the death of a Yale classmate. In so doing, he also reflects upon the American fifties, offering a provocative look at the way we were - rather than the way we thought we were - and its consequences.

"Trillin is recording a time, a place, and an illusion...which Trillin punctures gracefully and not without tenderness." (New York Newsday)