Remembering Denny

by Calvin Trillin

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Remembering Denny is Calvin Trillin's most inspired and powerful book to date: a memoir, a work of investigative reporting, a book of self-examination that captures something essential about how America has changed. In 1957, the graduation from Yale of Denny Hansen - "a strapping young man with a flat-top crew cut and a gregarious manner and a broad, absolutely dazzling smile"--Was the subject of a feature in Life magazine, with photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt. A varsity swimmer and Phi show more Beta Kappa and Rhodes Scholar from California, Hansen was the emblematic college hero of his time and place. His classmates used to joke about the posts they would occupy when he was President. But life worked out differently for Denny Hansen. After some early jobs in government and journalism, he concentrated on foreign affairs, eventually becoming a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. He gradually lost touch with his family and his old friends. As time passed, his sunny disposition was overtaken by "all sorts of serious problems - physical, psychological, and maybe even spiritual." Trillin's memoir is an attempt to chart the mysterious course of a life that had seemed full of limitless promise. It is also an investigation of the American fifties - of the assumptions that Trillin and his generation inherited and how those assumptions fared during the transformation of American society over the next forty years. Remembering Denny is a meditation on our country's evolving sense of itself. show less

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40+ Works 6,606 Members
Calvin Trillin attended public schools in Kansas City and went on to Yale University and graduated in 1957; he later served as a Fellow of the University. He was born on December 5, 1935. He worked as a reporter for Time magazine before joining the staff of The New Yorker in 1963. His reporting for The New Yorker on the racial integration of the show more University of Georgia was published in his first book, An Education in Georgia. Family, travel and food are also themes in Trillin's work. Three of his books American Fried; Alice, Let's Eat; and Third Helpings; were individually published and are also collected in the 1994 compendium The Tummy Trilogy. He has also written a collection of short stories Barnett Frummer Is An Unbloomed Flower (1969) and three comic novels, Runestruck (1977), Floater (1980), and Tepper Isn't Going Out (2001). Among his recent work, is Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse. He was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor for Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff, in 2012. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Common Knowledge

Original title
Remembering Denny
Original publication date
1993
People/Characters
Denny Hansen

Classifications

Genres
Biography & Memoir, Nonfiction, General Nonfiction
DDC/MDS
300.92Society, government, & cultureSocial sciences, sociology & anthropologySocial sciencesHistory, geographic treatment, biographyBiography of Social Scientists
LCC
H59 .H355 .T75Social sciencesSocial sciences (General)
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Statistics

Members
295
Popularity
108,855
Rating
½ (3.44)
Languages
English
Media
Paper
ISBNs
4
ASINs
2