John Thorndike (born Nov. 6, 1942, in New York City) is an American writer who lives in Athens, OH. He grew up in Westport, Connecticut, graduated from Harvard in 1964, took an MA in English from Columbia in 1966, and spent two years in El Salvador in the Peace Corps. After seven years in Latin America, he returned to the U.S., settled in Ohio, and farmed for ten years.
His first book was the novel Anna Delaney’s Child, about a woman whose nine-year-old son dies in a car crash.
His second novel was The Potato Baron, about the owner of a large potato farm in northern Maine who must choose between his wife—who wants to live somewhere other than Aroostook County—and the life he loves on his ancestral land.
Thorndike’s third book was a memoir, Another Way Home, about raising his son after his wife became schizophrenic.
His most recent book, The Last of His Mind: A Year in The Shadow of Alzheimer’s, will be published by Swallow Press in late 2009. It’s a memoir of the year he spent looking after his father, Joseph J. Thorndike—the managing editor of Life[link] from 1946-49 and a founder of American Heritage[link] and Horizon[link] magazines—as he lost his memory, language, self-awareness, and ultimately his life.
Bibliography
1. Anna Delaney’s Child - Hardcover: 273 pages, Macmillan (1986), ISBN 0-02-618390-0. Paperback: 273 pages; Plume (1987), ISBN 0-452-25998-3
2. The Potato Baron - Hardcover: 284 pages, Villard (1989), ISBN 0-394-57712-4
3. Another Way Home: A Single Father’s Story - Hardcover: 245 pages, Crown (1996), ISBN 0-517-70542-7; Paperback: 245 pages, Penguin (1997), ISBN 0-14-026570-8