Calvin Trillin Book Discussion

The library will host a discussion of Third Helpings by Calvin Trillin on Monday, April 21 at 7:00 PM. The program will be free and open to the public.

Readers will find Third Helpings collected in Trillin’s omnibus volume The Tummy Trilogy. This program is the third and final in the library’s discussion series featuring American food writing, led by writer and editor Linda Landrigan.

Calvin Trillin is a journalist, humorist, and food writer. He wrote the “U. S. Journal” feature for The New Yorker for fifteen years; a weekly, syndicated newspaper column, “Uncivil Liberties,” for over a decade; and a weekly column for Time magazine. Also a longtime contributor to The Nation, he currently writes the “Deadline Poet” feature. He was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2012 and in 2013 was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

Trillin’s essays on food were collected in American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat; and Third Helpings, and these three books were subsequently published as a single volume, The Tummy Trilogy.

Though he has written extensively, and with participatory zeal, about food during his career, Trillin once explained to the New York Times that he had no desire to be a restaurant critic. “I’m not interested in finding the best chili restaurant in Cincinnati,” he said. “I’m interested in Cincinnatians fighting about who has the best chili.”