a personCalvin Trillin

American journalist and food writer, born 5 December 1935 in Kansas City, Missouri. He joined The New Yorker in 1963 and wrote its "U.S. Journal" series from 1967 to 1982, a piece a month from somewhere in the country. One of those pieces, in 1980, took the Buffalo wing out of western New York.

Trillin's method was to go somewhere small and write it at full length. "An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing" is the title he gave the 1980 piece, and the hedge in it is the point: he went to Buffalo, he asked the Bellissimos, and he came back with more than one answer.

Dominic Bellissimo gave him the midnight version — "It was Friday night in the bar and since people were buying a lot of drinks he wanted to do something nice for them at midnight when the mostly Catholic patrons would be able to eat meat again" — and Trillin printed it alongside the others rather than choosing.

The piece is why the rest of the country knows the Anchor Bar's date. It is also, read now, the earliest widely circulated document that the story had versions.

His food books — American Fried (1974), Alice, Let's Eat (1978), Third Helpings (1983) — were collected in 1994 as The Tummy Trilogy. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008 and won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2012.

The corpus article read for this record, dated 16 September 2026, has him living in Greenwich Village and writing. No later record was checked.