Dan Wakefield, an accomplished scribe who rubbed elbows with political luminaries and literary giants while capturing American lives—including his own—in his books, journalistic dispatches, and screenplays, died in Florida on Wednesday. He was 91.
His attorney, Ken Bennett, confirmed his death to The Indianapolis Star, though he did not share a cause. Will Higgins, a friend and former radio colleague, told The New York Times that the writer had moved from Indianapolis to Miami after a stroke late last year.
“What is incredible about Dan is the experiences he had in his writing life and the number of people he called a friend, from Kurt Vonnegut to James Baldwin,” Bennett told the Star.
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The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library was among those who paid tribute to Wakefield, calling him “a friend, esteemed writer, and passionate advocate for literature.” Wakefield edited three collections of Vonnegut’s scribblings, collecting his letters, speeches, and stories. He evidently enjoyed burnishing this credential, and for a time maintained the website vonnegutsoldestlivingfriend.com, which now redirects to his blog.
In an email sent to supporters on Thursday, the museum’s chief executive, Julia Whitehead, said that Wakefield “captured the essence of life’s complexities” in his writing.
“Dan made a difference,” she said, according to the Star. “He was generous with his time. He was passionate about civil rights. He was a compassionate teacher. He was passionate about family and friends. He was part of Kurt’s ‘extended family’ and our extended family. We will miss him terribly.”
Wakefield wrote nearly two dozen books over his lifetime. Most of them were nonfiction, and several dealt with his spiritual journey away and back to the church, but he was perhaps most well known for Going All the Way, an autobiographical 1970 novel that became a bestseller. When it was turned into a movie starring Jeremy Davies, Ben Affleck, and Rachel Weisz, Wakefield penned the script.
The comic sex romp Starting Over followed three years later and, having proved equally popular with readers, was also adapted into a film—although James L. Brooks was tapped to write the screenplay this time around. The feature, starring Burt Reynolds and Candice Bergen, was nominated for two Academy Awards.
Born in 1932 in Indianapolis, Wakefield struck out for New York City after high school, studying at Columbia University and diving into Greenwich Village’s alternative scene.
“Poetry was in the air in those days, just as jazz was. Mailer said jazz was ‘the background music’ of New York in the fifties; poetry was the liturgy,” he remembered in a 2019 interview with Susan Neville, a friend, author, and professor at Butler University. Wakefield said he’d carried a paperback collection of Federico García Lorca’s poetry everywhere “like a priest with the catechism” in those days.
But it was as a journalist that he’d make his name in New York, particularly in his work for The Nation, which sent him south to cover the Emmett Till murder trial in 1955. After the weeklong trial ended with the suspects’ acquittal, the then-23-year-old Wakefield wrote, “The trial week won’t be forgotten here soon, and glimpses of the ‘foreign’ Negroes who don’t till cottonfields but hold positions as lawyers, doctors, and Congressmen have surely left a deep and uncomfortable mark on the whites of the Delta.” He added acidly: “But at least for the present, life is good again.”
He also wrote for The New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, and covered the Vietnam War for The Atlantic. In early 1968, the magazine dedicated an entire issue to his reporting, having tasked him with traveling and capturing “as much as you can of America, its people, its moods, its troubles and disillusionments, its still bright and valid dreams, its many ways of life (and not a little death).”
Then 35, Wakefield spent more than four months criss-crossing the United States on the assignment. “Frankly, I was neither scientific enough nor colorful enough to have my mission seem acceptable or credible to many of the natives,” he wrote of the Americans he encountered. “Most of them, though, were kind enough to tolerate me and humor what seemed to some of them my mysterious enterprise. I am grateful to them, and to the hospitality that often was extended me.”
Another great year must surely have been 1959, when Wakefield published his first book, the nonfiction treatise Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem, which won effusive praise from none other than James Baldwin. “Dan Wakefield has a remarkable combination of humility and tough-mindedness that makes these streets and these struggling people come alive,” Baldwin wrote, according to the Indianapolis Business Journal.
In 1977, Wakefield was hired by NBC to create a coming-of-age television movie and follow-up series about a teenage boy who moves from Oregon to Massachusetts. The show premiered to high ratings and warm reviews, with The Washington Post calling it “ambitious, inquisitive and authentic.” But it proved controversial in its frank depiction of teenage sexuality, and Wakefield would depart under a cloud the next year, having tangled with network executives over an episode in which the protagonist loses his virginity. The show was canceled shortly after.
Wakefield returned to Indianapolis in 2011, where he was in high demand as a local celebrity. “Almost every night he would be headed someplace to give a talk or going to some dinner party where he’d be the guest of honor,” Higgins told the Business Journal. “It was fantastic.”
Wakefield was an incredible storyteller—and not just when he had a pen in his hands. Neville recalled to the Indianapolis Star how Wakefield held court at the Red Key Tavern, a popular Indianapolis watering hole.
“He could have everyone laughing and smiling and crying,” she said.
