Dan Wakefield, a versatile and adroit writer who chronicled the civil rights movement as a journalist, recounted his journey from atheism to Christianity as a memoirist, and explored questions of love, friendship, joy and despair as a novelist, notably in his best-selling book “Going All the Way,” died March 13 at a care center in Miami. He was 91.

His attorney, H. Kennard Bennett, said that Wakefield had been in declining health and had a stroke last year, shortly before he moved from Indianapolis, his hometown, to South Florida, where he was living with his goddaughter, Karina Corrales.

A mild-mannered author with a sardonic, self-deprecating wit, Wakefield wrote five novels and about a dozen nonfiction books, tackling subjects ranging from civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movement to the creation of the hit soap opera “All My Children.” He wrote for magazines including the Nation, the Atlantic, GQ and Yoga Journal (yoga helped him get “in sync,” he said); interviewed politicians including Robert F. Kennedy and Golda Meir; and ventured into show business, creating a short-lived NBC drama, “James at 15” (1977-78).

For Wakefield, writing was a ticket to adventure, a way to escape his cloistered Midwestern upbringing and seek out “the meaning, the grail, the story,” as he once put it.

He was only 23 when he landed his first major magazine assignment for the Nation, getting a round-trip bus ticket to travel from New York to Mississippi to cover the murder trial of Emmett Till. A 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago, Till had been kidnapped, beaten, shot in the head and thrown in the Tallahatchie River in August 1955, lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in a grocery store. Weeks after his murder, his assailants were acquitted by an all-white jury.

“The crowds are gone,” Wakefield wrote after the verdict, “and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it. Citizens who drink from the ‘Whites Only’ fountain in the courthouse breathe much easier now. … The streets are quiet, Chicago is once more a mythical name, and everyone here ‘knows his place.’ ”

Wakefield went on to receive critical acclaim for nonfiction books including “Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem” (1959), a dispatch from the Manhattan neighborhood where he lived for six months, and “Supernation at Peace and War” (1968), his account of a nearly six-month odyssey traveling across the country, interviewing peaceniks and hippies and soldiers and their families in an attempt to take the pulse of a nation divided by the Vietnam War.

The book was adapted from an Atlantic article that filled an entire issue of the magazine, and that left Wakefield exhausted and wrung out. Ready to try something different, he moved to Los Angeles, hunkered down at an apartment in Venice Beach and started his first novel, “Going All the Way” (1970). Mixing high comedy and elegiac sadness, the book recounted the disillusionment of a pair of still-youthful Korean War veterans returning home to Indianapolis in the summer of 1954.

Its admirers included writer Kurt Vonnegut, a fellow Indianapolis native who had gone to the same high school as Wakefield and became a longtime friend. In a foreword to the novel, Vonnegut declared that “Going All the Way” was “a richer book than ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’” – Philip Roth’s comic portrait of a sexually frustrated young man – and dryly explained that the book was “about what hell it is to be oversexed in Indianapolis, and why so many oversexed people run away from there.”

Wakefield wrote the screenplay for the book’s 1997 film adaptation, which starred Jeremy Davies, Ben Affleck and Rachel Weisz. His second novel, the bestseller “Starting Over” (1973), was also adapted into a film, released in 1979 with a cast that included Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh and Candice Bergen. (Wakefield wasn’t entirely happy with the script by future filmmaker James L. Brooks. “Very nice movie,” he told Indianapolis Monthly, “but it had nothing to do with the novel.”)

The book’s protagonist, a recently divorced man who tries to deal with his loneliness through sex, drugs and alcohol, loosely resembled the author himself, who was married and divorced three times and recalled posing for the novel’s jacket photo at his “living room bar, flanked by bottles of favorite vodkas, bourbons and burgundies.”

Wakefield acknowledged that for 25 years, he used booze “as regularly and as purposely as daily medicine.”

In his book “New York in the Fifties” (1992), he recalled that he drunkenly cut his wrist one night in the early 1960s, contemplating suicide, “and later woke not only with the pain, guilt, and anguish of that self-destructive act but the horrible realization that this was the day” he was being interviewed for Harvard’s Nieman journalism fellowship. He made it to the interview – a friend bandaged him up and served him two frozen daiquiris to calm his nerves – and got the fellowship.

Wakefield gave up alcohol and drugs while undergoing a spiritual awakening in the early 1980s. He had been baptized Presbyterian and grew up in the Baptist church, but became an atheist while in college and went decades without going to church. Then on Christmas Eve in 1980, he found himself at King’s Chapel in Boston, at the close of a nightmarish year in which a seven-year romantic relationship collapsed and he lost both his parents.

Soon he was regularly going to services, moved by “the sense of shared reverence, of reaching beyond one’s flimsy physical presence, while praying with a whole congregation.”

Wakefield went on to serve on the national board of the Unitarian-Universalist Christian Fellowship, according to his website, and recounted his spiritual journey in several books, beginning with the 1988 memoir “Returning.”

While he found it excruciating to write a novel – he likened the process to “performing brain surgery on yourself, without an anesthetic” – writing the memoir had a liberating effect. “It was not painful, but rather, seemed like a natural act, a process of being in tune with my own nature and expressing it,” he wrote in an essay. “I had never so much enjoyed and looked forward to the very act of writing.”

An only child, William Daniel Wakefield was born in Indianapolis on May 21, 1932. His father was a pharmacist who ran his own drugstore, and his mother was a homemaker.

Wakefield wrote for his high school newspaper and studied English at Columbia University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1955. He joined the Nation as a staff writer the next year and became a contributing editor at the Atlantic in 1968.

He went on to write novels including “Home Free” (1977), about a 1960s drifter; “Under the Apple Tree” (1982), a coming-of-age story set in the Midwest during World War II; and “Selling Out” (1985), about an English professor seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood. The book drew on Wakefield’s own experience in show business, notably as the creator of “James at 15,” which received praise for its sensitive depiction of a teenage boy growing up in Boston but struggled in the ratings and was canceled after two seasons.

“Consistently, it communicates something about the state of being young, rather than just communicating that it wishes to lure young viewers,” Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote in 1977. “And if it romanticizes adolescence through the weekly trials and triumphs of its teen-age hero, at least it does so in more ambitious, inquisitive and authentic ways than the average TV teeny-bop.”

Wakefield leaves no immediate survivors. He was still writing in recent years – at age 90, he published a biography for young adults, “Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer” – and often lectured in between projects, teaching creative writing at schools including the University of Iowa, Boston University and Florida International University in Miami.

He also led workshops on writing and spirituality, which he gave at churches, synagogues and Sing Sing prison in New York. He was guided, he said, by a quote from Nobel Peace Prize-winner Albert Schweitzer, emblazoned on a poster he held on to for years: “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know, the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found a way to serve.”

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

Cockney Rebel singer Steve Harley, who had a hit with ‘Make Me Smile,’ dies at 73

Next »

Netanyahu agrees to send Israeli officials to Washington to discuss prospective Rafah operation