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Dudley Clendinen

Biography

Dudley Clendinen

Dudley Clendinen is a former columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, an assistant managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and a national reporter and editorialist for The New York Times. He is the editor of a book of essays, The Prevailing South, and the author of the text for a book of photographs, Homeless in America. With Adam Nagourney, he is the coauthor of Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Dudley Clendinen

Books by Dudley Clendinen

A Place Called Canterbury
by Dudley Clendinen

Like so many members of the post–World War II generation, Dudley Clendinen sometimes imagined that his parents would live forever. It was an expectation he had to revise as his mother and father, who had once seemed so invincible, began to surrender to the passage of time. Yet even as they aged, they did not do so in the same ways as earlier generations. Thanks to advances in diet, medication, and elder care, people who grew up during the Depression and fought in World War II --- the Americans known as the Greatest Generation --- are living much longer than any generation before them. The longer they live, the more their children are drawn into their lives. Women and men who never expected to see their eightieth birthday are now celebrating their ninetieth or hundredth. They have become part of an unprecedented demographic phenomenon that Clendinen calls the New Old Age --- an experience for which neither they nor their children have been prepared.