Loudon Snowden Wainwright, Jr. (December 16, 1924[1] – December 12, 1988) was an American writer. He is the father of folk singer Loudon Wainwright III and singer Sloan Wainwright, and grandfather to Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche.[2]
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Loudon Wainwright, Jr. graduated from St. Andrew's School, Middletown, Delaware in 1942,[3] and attended and graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and joined St. Anthony Hall. After college, Wainwright served in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Wainwright joined the staff of Life magazine and worked in a variety of positions over the years. In 1964 he began writing "The View From Here", a regular column in the magazine which appeared until the magazine ceased weekly publication in 1972. From 1969 on he also served as assistant managing editor.[4]
When Life resumed publication as a monthly in 1978, he joined its staff as an editor, and continued to contribute to its pages after retiring from that position in 1985. After his death, the magazine published a retrospective in the February 1989 issue with excerpts from some of the two hundred columns he had written for it over the years.[5]
Wainwright was also the author of The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of Life, an informal history of the magazine.[5]
Wainwright died of colon cancer on December 12, 1988, at age 63.