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CALVIN TRILLIN
In 1979, Calvin Trillin was in Knoxville, Tennessee, to write about a high school girl who had died
in a car crash. One night, she had brought the family car home past her curfew. Without going into the
house, she got into another car with some friends and drove off again. Her father, a strict
disciplinarian, was enraged and jumped into his own car to give chase. A few miles down the road,
her car crashed and she was killed. Trillin couldn’t get the story out of his mind. He wondered: What
must the father feel like? Who was this girl? When a reporter for the local newspaper asked why
Trillin had come all the way from New York to write about an insignificant, if tragic, death, the best
answer he could muster was, “It sounded interesting.”
In a career spanning nearly half a century—forty-two years of it at The New Yorker—Calvin Trillin
has perfected the art of turning merely “interesting” events into vivid, suspenseful stories. The Boston
Globe once called Trillin “the bard of American idiosyncrasy,” and it is true that his interests are
almost absurdly broad. He has written about everything from murders to the Chinatown chicken that
beats all opponents at tic-tac-toe. In doing so, he has employed virtually every literary form
imaginable (article, essay, book, novel, poem, live performance). Remarkably, Trillin is as successful
a humorist as he is a reporter. He wears two hats: “the fedora with the press card and the jester’s hat
with the balls dangling on it,” he says.
Calvin Trillin was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on December 5, 1935. His father, Abe Trillin
(originally Trillinsky), was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who ran grocery stores and, later, a
restaurant. The Trillins weren’t a particularly religious family, although they made sure that Calvin
went to Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah. “I don’t think anybody in Kansas City could have
passed as an Orthodox Jew in New York. We were sort of farm club Jews,” he told Newsday’s Dan
Cryer.
Inspired by reading Stover at Yale, a 1911 novel about the WASPish exploits of Dink Stover, Abe
wanted his son to attend the great eastern university. Trillin entered Yale in 1953, he recalls in
Remembering Denny (1993), a “‘brown-shoe freshman” who had been selected by Yale “to be buffed
up a bit and sent out into the world prepared to prove their high-school classmates right in voting
them most likely to succeed.”
Trillin studied English and was the chairman of the Yale Daily News. He got a temporary job with
Time upon graduating in 1957, working in the magazine’s London and Paris bureaus. After almost two
years in the army, most of it spent on New York’s Governor’s Island, he was offered a reporter’s
position in Time’s Atlanta bureau, where he covered the early days of the civil rights movement.
Trillin’s first New Yorker assignment after landing a position there—“An Education in Georgia,” a
three-part series—grew out of this experience. An expanded version of the article was published in
book form in 1964. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Claude Sitton, the paper’s Atlanta bureau