Loudon Wainwright, Jr.
Loudon Snowden Wainwright, Jr. (December 16, 1924[1] – December 12, 1988), was an American writer. He was the father of folk singer Loudon Wainwright III and singer Sloan Wainwright, and grandfather to Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, and Lucy Wainwright Roche.[2]
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Education
Wainwright graduated from St. Andrew's School, Middletown, Delaware in 1942,[3] and attended and graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and joined St. Anthony Hall. After college, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Career
Wainwright joined the staff of Life magazine and worked in a variety of positions over the years, including covering the Mercury astronauts. He and John Glenn listened to the inauguration speech of John F. Kennedy while riding in Glenn's car in 1961.[4] In 1964 he began writing "The View From Here", a regular column in the magazine which appeared until the magazine ceased weekly publication in 1972. From 1969 on he also served as assistant managing editor.[5]
When Life resumed publication as a monthly in 1978, he joined its staff as an editor, and continued to contribute to its pages after retiring from that position in 1985. After his death, the magazine published a retrospective in the February 1989 issue with excerpts from some of the two hundred columns he had written for it over the years.[6]
Wainwright was also the author of The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of Life, an informal history of the magazine.[6]
Death
Wainwright died of colon cancer on December 12, 1988, at age 63.
References
- ↑ Social Security Death Index
- ↑ family tree on Sloan Wainwright's web site.
- ↑ 1942 Criss Cross, p. 20, St. Andrews School Publications.
- ↑ John Glenn A Memoir, 1999
- ↑ Contemporary Authors vol. 127 (1989), Trosky, Susan M., ed, Gale Research Inc., p. 470.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Books of the Times", New York Times, December 11, 1986, Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, [1] accessed 26 Sept. 2006.
