UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Award-winning author, journalist and Penn State alumnus Paul Hendrickson will be the featured guest during a public lecture and Q&A session on Jan. 26 on the University Park campus. The hour-long event begins at 5:30 p.m. in Kern Auditorium (112 Kern Building).
Hendrickson has authored eight books, most recently “Fighting the Night: Iwo Jima, World War II, and a Flyer’s Life,” which provides an account of his father piloting a Black Widow night fighter on Iwo Jima in the last part of World War II.
Hendrickson, who earned his master’s degree in English at Penn State, is a retired senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. Before moving into higher education in 1998, Hendrickson had already worked in daily journalism for decades, including a role as a feature writer at the Washington Post from 1977 to 2001.
His book “Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost” was a 2011 New York Times best seller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He earned the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for “Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and its Legacy.” His 1996 book about Vietnam, “The Living and the Dead: Rober McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War,” was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Hendrickson was born in California but grew up in the Midwest and in a Catholic seminary in the Deep South, where he studied seven years for the missionary priesthood. That experience provided the subject of his first book, “Seminary: A Search,” in 1983. He is also the author of “Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott,” which was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award.
He has earned writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. In 2009, Hendrickson was a joint visiting professor of documentary practice at Duke University and of American studies at the University of North Carolina.
Hendrickson, who has a bachelor’s degree in English from St. Louis University, started his career at WPSX-TV, which later became WPSU at Penn State. He worked as a reporter in Indianapolis and Detroit before first joining the National Observer in Washington, D.C., and then the Post.