Wakefield, Dan

Dan Wakefield is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. His bestselling novels Going All The Way and Starting Over were adapted into feature films, and his memoir New York in the Fifties became a documentary film. He has served as a sports correspondent and writer for several magazines and newspapers, including Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine. Wakefield, a Hoosier, began his writing career as a columnist for his high school newspaper, The Shortridge Daily Echo. Kurt Vonnegut had graduated from Shortridge High a few years earlier. The two didn’t know each other at the time, but they eventually met and became lifelong friends. Vonnegut’s life was marked by great fortune and tragedy: his family was wealthy but lost everything in the market crash of 1929; he was the youngest son in a loving family until his mother fell into a depression and committed suicide; he joined the army in WWII with great pride for his country but experienced a world of destruction and horror. Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer (Triangle Square) distills the facts – filtered through his novels, essays, interviews, letters, and personal experiences – into the telling of the making of one of the greatest American writers.