Donald Vining

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Donald Vining (Benton, Pennsylvania, June 20, 1917 – January 24, 1998, New York City) was the son of Charles Horace Vining, Jr. and Marjorie Crossley Vining. He attended West Chester University in Pennsylvania prior to attending the Yale School of Drama, where he was a playwrighting major. A number of his plays have been produced for the stage and for the WICC Radio "Listeners' Theatre", broadcast on the Yankee Network. His plays were subsequently published in such volumes as Yale Radio Plays and Plays For Players.

In the 1950s he served as Drama Editor of What's Cookin' magazine and wrote numerous freelance articles and stories for other varied publications and periodicals. After a 30 year career at Teacher's College, Columbia University, he took early retirement to start his own publishing company, The Pepys Press. This publishing firm produced five volumes of his acclaimed A Gay Diary^[1] as well as a book of diaries from the Second World War, American Diaries of World War II, and other works.

Vining published essays on gay relationships — his own with his partner Richmond Purinton lasted more than 43 years — which appeared in varied American periodicals. He also wrote numerous scripts, plays, poems and stories throughout his lifetime. His first story published in book form was in Cross-Section 1945 with his Show Me The Way To Go Home. Vining's short story The Old Dog was later published in Story Magazine, soon after immortalized in the book Story: The Fiction of The Forties, and today continues to be used in schools across the USA.

He was selected for inclusion in the Who's Who in the East 25th Edition, published in 1994. He died in New York City on January 24, 1998 at the age of 80.