A reissue of Calvin Trillin's memoir of his relationship with a
brilliant but tragic Yale classmate that is also a rumination on social
change in the 1950s and 1960s
"Remembering Denny" is perhaps
Calvin Trillin's most inspired and powerful book: a memoir of a
friendship, a work of investigative reporting, and an exploration of a
country and a time that captures something essential about how America
has changed since Trillin--and Denny Hansen--were graduated from Yale in
1957. Roger "Denny" Hansen had seemed then a college hero for the ages:
a charmer with a dazzling smile, the subject of a feature in "Life
"magazine, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a varsity swimmer, a Rhodes
scholar...perhaps a future president, as his friends only half-joked.
But after early jobs in government and journalism, Hansen's life
increasingly took a downward turn and he gradually lost touch with
family and old friends before eventually committing suicide--an obscure,
embittered, pain-racked professor--in 1991. In contemplating his
friend's life, Calvin Trillin considers questions both large and
small--what part does the pressure of high expectations place on even
the most gifted, how difficult might it have been to be a closeted
homosexual in the unyielding world of the 1960s Foreign Service, how
much responsibility does the individual bear for all that happens in his
life--in a book that is also a meditation on our country's evolving
sense of itself.
