Calvin Trillin TOPICS: Arts / Music / Drama Humor Food Journalism Media / Broadcast / Print FEE CATEGORY:* 15.0k to 20.0k TRAVELS FROM: New York Profile Books & Videos Request This Speaker

Calvin Trillin: Profile

Calvin Trillin has been acclaimed in fields of writing that are remarkably diverse. As someone who has published solidly reported pieces in The New Yorker for more than thirty years, he has been called "perhaps the finest reporter in America." His antic commentary on the American scene and his books chronicling his adventures as a "happy eater" have earned him renown as "a classic American humorist." His best-selling Remembering Denny, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1993, was hailed as "an elegiac, disturbing and altogether brilliant memoir."

In 1963 he became a staff writer for The New Yorker. From 1967 to 1982, he produced a highly praised series of articles for The New Yorker called U.S. Journal -- 3,000-word pieces every three weeks from somewhere in the United States, on subjects that ranged from the murder of a farmer's wife in Iowa to the author's effort to write the definitive history of a Louisiana restaurant called Didee's "or to eat an awful lot of baked duck and dirty rice trying."

Some of the murder stories from that series were published in 1984 as Killings, a book that was described by William Geist in the New York Times Book Review as "that rarity, reportage as art."

From 1978 through 1985, Trillin was a columnist for The Nation, writing what USA Today called "simply the funniest regular column in journalism."

From 1986 through 1995, the column was syndicated to newspapers by King Features. These columns were collected in five books: Uncivil Liberties (1982), With All Disrespect (1985), If You Can't Say Something Nice (1988), Enough's Enough (1990), and Too Soon To Tell (1995). In February, 1996, Trillin returned to the pages of Time as a columnist

Trillin's work has included two comic novels and a collection of short stories and a travel book and an account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia.

His three antic books on eating -- American Fried, Alice, Let's Eat, and Third Helpings -- were compiled in 1994 into a single volume called The Tummy Trilogy. Messages From My Father was published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June of 1996 and became a New York Times national bestseller. A year later, The Noonday Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, published it in paperback.

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