Biography of Calvin Trillin

Calvin Trillin, author of the weekly column "Uncivil Liberties," has been acclaimed in fields of writing which are remarkably diverse.
Having published solidly reported pieces in The New Yorker for more than twenty years, Trillin has been called "perhaps the finest reporter in America." His antic commentary on the American scene has earned him renown as " a classic American humorist." His books chronicling his adventures as a "happy eater" caused Business Week to say, "Trillin is to food writing what Chaplin was to film acting."

In whatever sort of writing he does, Trillin has an unadorned point of view that is deeply rooted in a Midwestern upbringing. He was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and he has never stopped writing about his hometown.

He graduated from Yale in 1957, did a hitch in the army, and then joined Time magazine. After a year covering the South from the Atlanta bureau, he became a writer for Time in New York.

In 1963, Trillin became a staff writer for The New Yorker. From 1967 to 1982, he produced a highly praised series of articles for that magazine called "U.S. Journal" (three-thousand-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 the definitive history of a Louisiana restaurant called Didee's "or to eat an awful lot of baked duck and dirty rice trying."

From 1978 through 1985, he was a columnist for The Nation—writing what USA Today has called "simply the funniest regular column in journalism." A collection of the columns, Uncivil Liberties, was published in 1982. A second collection, With All Disrespect, came out in 1985.

His three books on eating, which he sometimes refers to as "the tummy trilogy," are American Fried; Alice, Let's Eat; and Third Helpings. These books also concentrate on America—leading Craig Claiborne of The NewYork Times to call Trillin "the Walt Whitman of American eats."

Trillin also has published two comic novels, has written and performed in a one-man show (where he got rave reviews), and has appeared on Today, The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman. His most recent book, Family Man, a memoir of his experiences as a husband and father, was published to favorable reviews in 1998.