Calvin Trillin is an important literary journalist whose most acclaimed work to date is Remembering Denny (1993), his rumination on the meaning of the life of a classmate at Yale who appeared destined for great things but whose life ended in suicide in 1991. Trillin is also an essayist, poet, memoirist, social historian, satirist, humorist, novelist, short-story writer, critic, and journalist. He is not, three books on food notwithstanding, a food critic or restaurant reviewer. He is, George W. Hunt has said in America, "one of America's finest writers." In a 1986 interview in Editor & Publisher, Trillin told David Astor, "I've always assumed that reporting is at the center of what I do. If I gave up the center, I thought maybe the sides would fall in." Trillin's reporting has appeared in magazines such as Time and The New Yorker; his journalism has also been collected in books or appeared originally...