Remembering Denny

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.

A memoir about how America has changed in the last 30 years. When Rhodes Scholar Denny Hansen graduated from Yale in 1957, Life magazine ran a feature on the college hero whose classmates joked would be President. But Hansen committed suicide in 1991. While charting the mysterious course of a life that had seemed full of limitless promise, Trillin's work also investigates the assumptions his generation inherited and their meaning in America today.

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.

Publishers Weekly

This collection was on PW 's bestseller list for seven weeks. (Apr.)

A humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and Robert Benchley, Calvin Trillin has been offering up his sly observations to magazine readers for decades, as a political "doggerelist" (The Deadline Poet) and columnist (Uncivil Liberties). He has also uncapped his pen to discuss the joys of family life and the pleasures of chasing down the perfect meal. Anna Quindlen, writing in her New York Times column in 1991, called him a man who disembowels pomp with such a good-natured sword.