USA Dan Wickenden and Dorothy Wickenden, his daughter - Authors

DAN WICKENDEN (Obituary from the New York Times, "Dan Wickenden, Author and Editor, Dies at 76," by Wolfgang Saxon, Oct. 29, 1989)

Dan Wickenden, an author and retired senior editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the book publisher, died of a heart attack Friday at his home in Weston, Conn. He was 76 years old.

Mr. Wickenden, whose short stories had been published in a wide array of magazines, made his mark as a novelist in 1937 with ''The Running of the Deer.'' It was his first book, a best seller portraying two middle-class Long Island families.

His theme, family life, next appeared in ''Walk Like a Mortal,'' published in 1940. It was the story of a 17-year-old boy and the effect his parents' breakup had on him.

Mr. Wickenden then spent a few years working for a newspaper in Michigan, which became the setting for ''The Wayfarers.'' A leisurely picture of a middle-class family in the Middle West, it was picked as the best novel of 1945 by Orville Prescott, the book critic of The New York Times. Born Leonard Daniel Wickenden to English-born parents in Tyrone, Pa., Mr. Wickenden grew up on Long Island and graduated from Amherst University in 1935. Early in his career, he published stories in magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

For a complete change of pace, Mr. Wickenden took his 1950 novel, ''The Dry Season,'' to Guatemala. Against the daunting beauty of Lake Atitlan, it told the tale of a self-exiled colony of North American dropouts among the ancient ways and wisdom of Indian weavers and fishermen.

Mr. Prescott then called Mr. Wickenden ''one of the ablest of contemporary American novelists,'' who had ''not yet received the critical recognition that is his due.''

Other books by Mr. Wickenden included ''Tobias Brandywine'' (1948), another family portrait set in the Depression; ''The Red Carpet'' (1952), which told of a young man from the Middle West seeking his fame and fortune in New York City, and ''The Amazing Vacation'' (1956), a fantasy for children. He came to Harcourt as associate editor in 1953. Among the authors he brought to the publishing house was Edward Louis Wallant, whose 1961 novel ''The Pawnbroker'' he edited.

He retired as senior editor in 1978 but continued to accept freelance editing and consulting assignments and, until 1981, taught a writing course at the University of Fairfield.

Mr. Wickenden is survived by his wife, the former Hermione Hillman; two sons, David, of Washington, and Peter, of New Haven; a daughter, Dorothy, of Washington; a sister, Barbara Hermenze of Weston, and two grandchildren.

In a chapter on Family History in the Memoirs of the Thomas Rogers Wickenden Families, Homer Wickenden writes that "there is a branch of the Wickenden family which centered around Tinbridge Wells in Kent. This branch descended from a Thomas Wickenden who lived in Frinsbury near Rochester, a nephew of our great great grandfather Thomas, father of Samuel. His son James set up a business of estate planning in 1830. His descendants include Charles R. F. Wickenden of Dallas Teas, formerly of Chappaqua, N.Y. and Dan Wickenden, the writer" (p. 2).

DOROTHY WICKENDEN (Biography from https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dorothy-wickenden ) [Dorothy is the daughter of Dan Wickenden.]

Dorothy Wickenden has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since 1996. She joined the magazine as managing editor in 1995. She is also the moderator of the weekly podcast on newyorker.com, “The Political Scene.” A Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1988-89, Wickenden was the national-affairs editor at Newsweek from 1993-95. Before that, she spent fifteen years at The New Republic, as managing editor and later as executive editor. She edited “The New Republic Reader: 80 Years of Opinion and Debate” (Basic Books, 1994), and she is the author of “Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West” (Scribner, 2011), and The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abortion and Women's Rights (Simon and Schuster, Inc., 2021).