Calvin Trillin, the author of About Alice, has been acclaimed in fields of
writing that are remarkably diverse. As someone who has published solidly
reported pieces in the New Yorker for forty years, he has been called "perhaps
the finest reporter in America." Calvin Trillin's wry commentary on the
American scene and his book chronicling his adventures as a "happy eater" have
earned him renown as "a classic American humorist." His best-selling
Remembering Denny (1993) was hailed as "an elegiac, disturbing and altogether
brilliant memoir."
Calvin Trillin was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and now lives in
New York. He graduated from Yale in 1957, did a hitch in the army, and then
joined Time. After a year covering the South from the Atlanta bureau, he became
a writer for Time in New York.
In 1963, Calvin Trillin became staff writer for the New Yorker. From 1967 to
1982, he produced a highly praised series 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 a Louisiana restaurant
called Didee's "or 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, Calvin 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. From 1996 to 2001,
Calvin Trillin did a column for Time. His columns have been collected in five
books.
Since 1990, Calvin Trillin has written a piece of comic verse weekly for The
Nation. In 2004, he published Obviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in
Rhyme. A sequel, A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme, was
published in 2006. Both were New York Times best-sellers.
Calvin Trillin's books have included three comic novels (including the
best-seller Tepper Isn't Going Out) and a collection of short stories and a
travel book and an account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia.
Three of his 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.
His memoirs include Messages From My Father, a New York Times best-seller in
1996, and Family Man (1998).
Calvin Trillin lectures widely, and has appeared often as a guest on
television. He has written and presented two one-man shows at the American
Place Theater in New York ? both of them critically acclaimed and both
sell-outs. In reviewing "Words, No Music," in 1990, New York Times theater
critic Mel Gussow called Calvin Trillin "the Buster Keaton of performance
humorists."
