Calvin Trillin

Calvin Trillin, author of Feeding A Yen: Savoring Local Specialties from Kansas City to Cuzco, and the recent Obliviously On He Sails : The Bush Administration in Rhyme, has been acclaimed in fields of writing that are remarkably diverse. As someone who has published solidly reported pieces in The New Yorker for 40 years, he has been called "perhaps the finest reporter in America." His antic commentary on the American scene and his books chronicling his adventures as a "happy eater" have earned him recognition as "a classic American humorist." His bestseller, Remembering Denny, was hailed as "an elegiac, disturbing and altogether brilliant memoir."

Trillin was born and raised in Kansas City, MO. He graduated from Yale in 1957, served in the army, and then joined Time magazine. After a year covering the South from the Atlanta bureau, he moved north and worked out of the New York bureau.

In 1963, he became a staff writer for The New Yorker. From 1967 to 1982, he produced a highly-praised series of articles for The New Yorker called "US Journal," which were 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 his attempt at writing a definitive history of a Louisiana restaurant called Didee's "or to 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, Trillin was a columnist for The Nation, writing what USA Today called "simply the funniest regular column in journalism." The originality of this column led to its syndication in multiple newspapers from 1986 through 1995. These columns have been collected in five books: Uncivil Liberties, With All Disrespect, If You Can't Say Something Nice, Enough's Enough, and Too Soon to Tell.

After this column, Trillin wrote one for Time until 2001. During this time, Trillin also wrote a weekly piece of comic verse for The Nation and published Deadline Poet, his account of being a commentator-in-rhyme on the news of the day.

Trillin's books have included three comic novels: (a national bestseller Tepper Isn't Going Out), a collection of short stories, a travel book, and an account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia. His three 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 bestseller, and Family Man.

He lectures widely, and has appeared often as a guest on such television programs as Sunday Morning and The Late Show With David Letterman. 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 the fall of 1990, New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow called Trillin "the Buster Keaton of performance humorists."