It’s the birthday of journalist, food and travel writer, memoirist, humorist, and “deadline poet” Calvin Trillin (b. 1935), perhaps best known for his many articles and essays for The New Yorker and for collections like Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (2011), which won the 2012 Thurber Prize for American Humor.

Trillin was born in Kansas City, Missouri, where his father ran a restaurant and wrote a daily two-line poem on the chalkboard about pie, thus giving Trillin the right to call himself a second-generation poet. Trillin graduated from Yale University in 1957, did a brief stint in the army, and then began working as a journalist. Soon he wrote a three-part series for The New Yorker on the students who desegregated the University of Georgia. The result was his first book, An Education in Georgia (1964).

Trillin stayed on at the New Yorker and began traveling the U.S. to write articles about American life and, eventually, food, one of his favorite subjects; he published collections like American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater (1978), Alice, Let’s Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Eater (1978), and Third Helpings (1983). In 1978, Trillin also began writing for The Nation, where he wrote political humor and consistently razzed editor Victor Navasky, whom he always referred to as the “wily and parsimonious Navasky.” He also began writing doggerel on political events, beginning with the poem “If You Knew What Sununu,” and thus became The Nation’s “deadline poet.”

Trillin has also written a great deal about his family (his wife Alice, two daughters, and now several grandchildren), and if anyone out there loves and misses his wife more than Trillin, who was widowed in 2001, I’d like to know about it. He’s written movingly about her in About Alice (2006); a strong picture emerges, in this book and in his many writings about her before she died, of a highly educated, very beautiful, and extremely tolerant woman who weirdly enough tried to limit their family to three meals a day even though Trillin could produce “scientific evidence that entire herds of cattle owe their health to steady grazing.” His book Family Man (1998) is a wonderful and very funny collection of essays about his family and is a great place to start if you haven’t read Trillin before. He’s published many other collections of nonfiction, several novels, and recently his first book of children’s poetry, No Fair! No Fair! And Other Jolly Poems of Childhood (2016), illustrated by the great Roz Chast. (It looks hilarious and I am putting it on my Christmas list for me. Find it here.)

And another must-read: “A Final Cut: A family moviemaking tradition comes to an end” (Sept. 11, 2017, The New Yorker). It’s highly personal, moving, and funny. (Find it here.)

Read some Trillin if at all possible on this wintry white Wednesday and stay ever scrupulously honest to the data.