Background

James Dudley Clendinen was born on August 17, 1944, one of two children of James and Barbara Harrison Clendinen. His father was chairman of the editorial board of The Tampa Tribune, and his mother was food and society editor there.

Education

Dudley Clendinen graduated from Plant High School in Tampa and from Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 1968 with a degree in American history.

Career

Clendinen joined The St. Petersburg Times soon after his graduation, and remained there for 12 years, covering general and feature assignments, from 1968 to 1980. Later, with The New York Times from 1980 to 1987, he covered metropolitan news briefly, then was chief of the Boston and Atlanta bureaus.

In 1987, Clendinen became The Journal-Constitution’s assistant managing editor for features. He was hired by Bill Kovach, a former Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, who had been recruited in 1986 to revitalize the Atlanta papers. Both left in 1988 after a confrontation between Kovach and the publisher, Cox Newspapers. Clendinen edited “The Prevailing South: Life and Politics in a Changing Culture,” a collection of essays by historians, novelists, and journalists, and wrote the text for a volume of photographs, “Homeless in America.” Both were published in 1988. In 1990 and 1991, Clendinen was an assistant managing editor of The Baltimore Sun.

Over the next seven years, he and Adam Nagourney, a political reporter and national correspondent for The New York Times, researched and wrote “Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America,” published in 1999. The book covered the time from the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising in Greenwich Village to the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power or Act Up, in 1987. Clendinen wrote editorials for The New York Times from 1998 to 2000 and later, freelance articles for The Times, The New Yorker and other publications.

His last book, “A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America” (2008), detailed life in a Tampa retirement-nursing home, Canterbury Towers, where his widowed mother spent her last years and where Clendinen lived for 400 days. In 2009 and 2010, he taught writing at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Baltimore.

Achievements

• Clendinen was a productive journalist, who covered politics, the New South, health care and the great kaleidoscope of other topics. In his journalism, he explored homelessness, crowded prisons, an abortion doctor’s conscience and other tales of conflict and courage. And he wrote of gay life in America - the wretchedness of discrimination and the struggles for acceptance in religion, workplaces, and professions.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America

    (Told through the voices of gay activists and their oppone...)

    1999
  • A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America

    (An affectionate, touchingly empathetic look at old age in...)

    2008
  • The Prevailing South: Life and Politics in a Changing Culture

    (A collection of essays on the unique characteristics of t...)

    1988

Views

Quotations: "This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.”

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Dudley Clendinen was ill with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It is reported that he was found dead due to the illness.

Connections

Dudley Clendinen was married to Nancy Barritt in 1970. They later divorced due to Dudley's sexual orientation. He is survived by his daughter named Whitney Clendinen.

Father:

James Clendinen

James Clendinen was a chairman of the editorial board of The Tampa Tribune.

Mother:

Barbara Harrison Clendinen

Barbara Harrison Clendinen was a food and society editor of The Tampa Tribune.

Wife:

Nancy Barritt

Sister:

Melissa Spring

References

• Contemporary Authors vol. 233