Word: trillin
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...ANYONE CURIOUS ABOUT WHAT it is like to work at TIME, Calvin Trillin's 1980 novel, Floater, is required reading. The story of a hapless writer at a national weekly newsmagazine suspiciously like this one, it skewers some of TIME's most revered traditions, including this very page. Though Trillin now tries to pretend that Floater is "made up," he in fact gathered inside information during nearly three years on TIME's staff. In 1960, after graduating from Yale and serving in the Army, he joined the Atlanta bureau, reporting on the civil rights movement. He then moved...
Happily, no hard feelings remained. With this issue, Trillin's deadpan humor and lucid prose return to the pages of TIME as a regular feature. He will be writing a weekly column on a characteristically far-reaching range of subjects. "Sometimes it'll be about Washington," he says. "Sometimes it'll be about what's in my basement." Whatever he turns his attention to is usually just fine with his readers. "Trillin is one of the great delights of American journalism," says managing editor Walter Isaacson. "He has the eyes and ears of a great reporter...
Since his first stint at TIME, Trillin's wry political commentary, his accounts of gastronomical journeys in search of the perfect barbecue and his compassionate reportage of small-town America have appeared in the New Yorker, where he is a staff writer, in a syndicated newspaper column and in the Nation, to which he contributes a weekly poem (a genre he took up during the Bush Administration when the phrase "If you knew what John Sununu" came to him in an inspired flash). His 19th book, Messages from My Father, is to be published this spring...
...Trillin follows these leads as he traces Denny's parabola from college through abortive attempts at journalism to a slow decline in academia. Along the way he provides a superb portrait of an individual, a group and a vanished sensibility...
...time you're growing up they keep stuffing promises into the knapsack. Pretty soon, it's just too heavy to carry. You have to unpack." As the author acknowledges, almost all of Denny's generation have found themselves bent with expectations that will never be realized. Unpacking, Trillin provides a class act in every sense of the word...