Calvin Trillin

Calvin Trillin: reporter, humorist, and chronicler of American appetites

Calvin Marshall Trillin was born on December 5, 1935, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Edythe and Abe Trillin. Raised Jewish, and called “Buddy” by his parents, he grew up in public schools and graduated from Southwest High School. He went on to Yale University, where he chaired the Yale Daily News, belonged to Pundits and Scroll and Key, and graduated in 1957. He later served as a Fellow of the University. That mix of Midwestern beginnings, Jewish family life, and Ivy League newspaper training helped form the voice that would become familiar to readers: observant, funny, skeptical, and alert to ordinary details.

After serving in the U.S. Army, Trillin became a reporter for Time magazine. In 1963 he joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he built much of his reputation. From 1967 to 1982 he wrote the magazine’s “U.S. Journal” series, covering local events around the United States, some serious and some quirky. His reporting on the racial integration of the University of Georgia became his first book, An Education in Georgia, published in 1964. The book showed an early part of his range: he could write about public conflict with a reporter’s steadiness and a humorist’s ear for human behavior.

Food, family, travel, politics, and American habits became the main subjects of Trillin’s work. His food books American Fried (1974), Alice, Let’s Eat (1978), and Third Helpings (1983) were gathered in 1994 as The Tummy Trilogy. He also wrote fiction, including the short-story collection Barnett Frummer is an Unbloomed Flower (1969) and the comic novels Runestruck (1977), Floater (1980), and Tepper Isn’t Going Out (2002), a novel about a man who enjoys parking in New York City for its own sake. His humor often began with a small, stubborn fact and followed it until it revealed something larger.

Trillin also became a steady presence in political and comic journalism. From 1975 to 1987 he contributed to Moment, an independent magazine focused on American Jewish life. In 1978 he began writing for The Nation with a column called “Variations,” later renamed “Uncivil Liberties,” which ran through 1985. A syndicated version ran in newspapers from 1986 to 1995, and a similar column ran in Time from 1996 to 2001. Since July 1990, he has written humorous poems on current events for his weekly “Deadline Poet” column in The Nation. In those columns, his jokes could be sharp, including his running fun at Nation editor Victor Navasky, whom he described as wily and parsimonious.

Family, memory, and recognition

Trillin married educator and writer Alice Stewart Trillin in 1965. They had two daughters; Alice died in 2001. He later wrote about family life and memory in books such as Messages from My Father (1996), Family Man (1998), and About Alice (2006), which grew from a New Yorker essay. In Messages from My Father, he wrote that his father expected him to be a Jew but had mainly “raised me to be an American.” Trillin’s honors include election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008, selection of his essay “Stranger with a Camera” for a Library of America retrospective the same year, the 2012 Thurber Prize for American Humor for Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff, and induction into the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2013. His work still draws readers because it keeps close to speech, appetite, family, place, and the comedy of daily life.