The Penguin Speakers Bureau

In the 1990s, after his father died, Dudley Clendinen, a former national reporter and editorial writer for The New York Times, became legally responsible for his sly, charming, and indomitable old mother, a stroke victim, and for his father’s eccentric and demented two sisters, Bessie and Carolyn, who promptly burned up their house. He drew close to a fiercely independent old cousin, Florence, who asked him to help her kill herself. He wrote about all this in The New York Times and elsewhere, and beginning in 2000, spent almost 400 days and nights at Canterbury Tower, the geriatric apartment building and nursing facility on Tampa Bay which his mother chose as her last home, living among a diverse group of old people from around the nation and the world. That experience became the basis of A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America. A non-fiction soap opera, a son’s book about himself and his mother, about her generation and his—and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lucas Prize for a distinguished nonfiction work-in-progress on an important contemporary American social or cultural issue—Canterbury was excerpted early on in The New York Times and on Forbes.com, and has been praised across the country. Reviewers and columnists in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The Seattle Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Miami Herald, loved the book for its cast of brave, dotty, determined old characters, and for its examination of the relationship of aging parents to their aging children.

Mr. Clendinen’s previous book, written with Adam Nagourney, chief political writer for The New York Times, was Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. Published by Simon & Schuster, it remains the major history of the movement, was a New York Times notable book, a finalist for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2000, and was nominated by the publisher for a Pulitzer Prize.

While at The New York Times, Clendinen was the first to write about the Religious Right, co-wrote the newspaper’s first front-page articles on AIDS, reported on presidential campaigns in the 1980s, covered the first Claus von Bulow trial, and the death of the crew in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Earlier, as a columnist for The St. Petersburg Times, he wrote from unrestricted access to Florida’s “Death Row” for a year.

He is the editor of a book of essays, The Prevailing South: Life and Politics in a Changing Culture, author of the text of a book of photographs, Homeless in America, and wrote the history of the gay rights movement in the United States for the Encarta (Microsoft Online) Encyclopedia. He came out in an essay on the Op-Ed Page of The New York Times in 1993, which became the germ of his subsequent gay rights history, and is a recovering alcoholic, a subject about which he has written and spoken. He has lectured in various forums, including the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, parts of Harvard University, and the Cooper Union in New York. He has appeared on C-SPAN, The Charlie Rose Show, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and various other PBS, NPR, and network and local television and radio programs. His magazine and newspaper essays have been reprinted in various anthologies, including Best American Essays. He collects contemporary Native American art, about which he sometimes writes and lectures, and he lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Masters in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.