# Calvin Trillin

Calvin Marshall Trillin (born December 5, 1935) is an American journalist, humorist, food writer, poet, memoirist and novelist. He is a winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor (2012) and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008).

## Early life and education

Calvin Trillin was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1935 to Edythe and Abe Trillin. In his book Messages from My Father, he said his parents called him "Buddy". Raised Jewish, he attended public schools in Kansas City, graduated from Southwest High School, and went on to Yale University, where he was the roommate and friend of Peter M. Wolf (for whose 2013 memoir, My New Orleans, Gone Away, he wrote a humorous foreword), and where he served as chair of the Yale Daily News and was a member of the Pundits and Scroll and Key before graduating in 1957; he later served as a Fellow of the University.

## Career

After serving in the U.S. Army, Trillin worked as a reporter for Time magazine, then joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1963. He wrote the magazine's "U.S. Journal" series from 1967 to 1982, covering local events both serious and quirky throughout the United States. His reporting for the magazine on the racial integration of the University of Georgia was published in his first book, An Education in Georgia (1964).
From 1975 to 1987, Trillin contributed articles to Moment, an independent magazine which focuses on the life of the American Jewish community.
Trillin also writes for The Nation. He began in 1978 with a column called "Variations", which was eventually renamed "Uncivil Liberties"; it ran through 1985. The same name was used for the column when it was syndicated weekly in newspapers, from 1986 to 1995, and essentially the same column ran (without a name) in Time from 1996 to 2001. His humor columns for The Nation during the 1980s and 1990s often made fun of then-editor Victor Navasky, whom he jokingly referred to as the wily and parsimonious Navasky. (He once wrote that the magazine paid "in the high two figures.") Since July 1990, Trillin has written humorous poems about current events as part of his weekly "Deadline Poet" column in The Nation.
Family, travel and food are major themes in Trillin's work. Three of his books on food — American Fried (1974), Alice, Let's Eat (1978) and Third Helpings (1983) — were collected in the 1994 compendium The Tummy Trilogy. Trillin has also written several autobiographical books and magazine articles, including Messages from My Father (1996), Family Man (1998), and an essay in the March 27, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, "Alice, Off the Page", discussing his late wife. In December 2006, a slightly expanded version of the essay was published as a book titled About Alice. In Messages from My Father, Trillin recounts how his father always expected his son to be a Jew, but had primarily "raised me to be an American".
Trillin 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 (2002). The latter novel is about a man who enjoys parking in New York City for its own sake and is unusual among novels for exploring the subject of parking.
In 2008, Trillin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The same year, The Library of America selected Trillin's essay "Stranger with a Camera" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime. In 2012, Trillin was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor for Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff, published by Random House. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

## Personal life

In 1965, Trillin married the educator and writer Alice Stewart Trillin, with whom he had two daughters. Alice died in 2001. He also has four grandchildren. Trillin lives in the Greenwich Village area of New York City.
Trillin was a close friend of Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne. He met Dunne when the two worked at Time in the 1960s. Dunne wrote an afterword to Trillin's 1993 book Remembering Denny and Trillin contributed a foreword to Dunne's posthumously released collection Regards (2005). In September 2022, Trillin was one of the speakers at Didion's memorial service in New York City.