After launching his career as a magazine journalist, he published best-selling novels including “Going All the Way.” He also wrote about his spiritual journey.
Author Dan Wakefield in 2003 at the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York. He wrote about his spiritual journey in “Returning,” a 1988 memoir. Dan Wakefield, a versatile and adroit writer who chronicled the civil rights movement as a journalist, recounted his journey from atheism to Christianity as a memoirist, and explored questions of love, friendship, joy and despair as a novelist, notably in his best-selling book “Going All the Way,” died March 13 at a care center in Miami. He was 91.
Its admirers included writer Kurt Vonnegut, a fellow Indianapolis native who had gone to the same high school as Mr. Wakefield and became a longtime friend. In a foreword to the novel, Vonnegut declared that “Going All the Way” was “a richer book than ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’” —comic portrait of a sexually frustrated young man — and dryly explained that the book was “about what hell it is to be oversexed in Indianapolis, and why so many oversexed people run away from there.
Mr. Wakefield went on to serve on the national board of the Unitarian-Universalist Christian Fellowship, according to his website, and recounted his spiritual journey in several books, beginning with the 1988 memoir “Returning.”the process to “performing brain surgery on yourself, without an anesthetic” — writing the memoir had a liberating effect. “It was not painful, but rather, seemed like a natural act, a process of being in tune with my own nature and expressing it,” he wrote in an essay.