Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Indianapolis native Dan Wakefield, who wrote popular coming-of-age novel “Going All the Way” in 1970 and worked as a magazine correspondent at the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial, died Wednesday in Florida. He was 91.
The 1950 graduate of Shortridge High School attended Columbia University in New York City and taught writing at the University of Massachusetts, University of Iowa, Boston University and other schools. Wakefield’s career included the publication of five novels and two memoirs.
Wakefield’s first published book, 1959’s nonfiction “Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem,” earned high praise from author and civil rights activist James Baldwin. “Dan Wakefield has a remarkable combination of humility and tough-mindedness that makes these streets and these struggling people come alive,” Baldwin wrote.
In 2011, Wakefield returned to Indianapolis, where he lived until November 2023. He spent the final months of his life in Florida with his goddaughter, Karina Corrales, according to the author’s Indianapolis-based attorney, H. Kennard Bennett.
Indianapolis served as the setting for “Going All the Way,” which was adapted for a 1997 film starring Ben Affleck, Jeremy Davies, Rose McGowan and Rachel Weisz. The plot is focused on two soldiers—a high school sports star, portrayed onscreen by Affleck, and an introvert, portrayed by Davies—who return to their hometown during the Korean War.
The movie was made in Indianapolis, with the Fountain Square neighborhood and Red Key Tavern, 5170 N. College Ave., serving as locations for filming.
The Red Key continued to be a favorite for Wakefield, who met regularly with friends such as author Susan Neville and journalist Will Higgins at the bar in recent years.
“He was very social and very generous with his time,” said Neville, a former Butler University faculty member who won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1984.
Wakefield, who dated Mia Farrow in the early 1990s and had one of his novels, “Starting Over,” adapted for a 1979 film starring Burt Reynolds, had no shortage of conversation topics.
“He was in demand,” said Higgins, a former features reporter for The Indianapolis Star. “Almost every night he would be headed someplace to give a talk or going to some dinner party where he’d be the guest of honor. It was fantastic.”
Wakefield began his career as a news reporter, writing about the acquittals of Roy Bryant and John W. Milam, two Mississippi men accused of killing 14-year-old Till, as a correspondent for The Nation magazine.
Wakefield returned to the courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, in 2022 to be interviewed for a documentary film.
“The issue for the local public,” Wakefield wrote in his original report, “was not that a visiting Negro boy named Emmett Louis Till had been dragged from his bed and identified later as a body that was pulled from the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton-gin fan tied around its neck with barbed wire—that issue was lost when people learned that the world was clamoring to have something done about it.”
Neville described Wakefield, who once interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, as one of the best journalists of the 20th century. An entire issue of The Atlantic magazine in 1968 was devoted to Wakefield’s reporting on the Vietnam War.
“He was one of the really true writers I’ve known in my life,” Neville said. “He risked living on his work. That meant that there were some lean years and some great years. He always just had this incredible passion for writing and for literature.”
Around the time of the publication of “Going All the Way,” Wakefield was befriended by fellow Shortridge alum Kurt Vonnegut.
In a review of “Going All the Way” published in Life magazine, Vonnegut wrote, “Having written this book, Dan Wakefield will never be able to go back to Indianapolis. He will have to watch the 500-Mile race on television.”
The reason, Higgins said, was because the novel “paints Indianapolis as a bunch of small-town, small-minded losers.”
Any hard feelings dissipated. In the 1980s, Higgins pitched the idea of a “rolling literary tour” in which Wakefield talked about Indianapolis landmarks represented in “Going All the Way” during a bus tour.
The author agreed, and the experiment was a hit, Higgins said.
“He was so good,” Higgins said. “Just give that guy a microphone and he can entertain for hours. It was really fun.”
In 2022, Wakefield wrote a biography for young readers titled “Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer.”
Bennett, the author’s attorney, said Wakefield’s goddaughter expressed an interest in arranging a celebration of life in Indianapolis later this year.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.