Clancy Sigal

Biography

Clancy Sigal(September 6, 1926 – July 16, 2017) was an American writer, and the author of dozens of essays and seven books, the best-known of which is the autobiographical novel Going Away (1961). Sigal was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a poor family. His father, Leo Sigal, and mother, Jennie Persily, were both labor organizers; He "acquired his chutzpah and resilience in 30s Chicago," Kim Howells wrote in The Guardian, "raised by his tough Jewish mother in a neighborhood blighted by gangsters, poverty and violence." He later wrote a book about his mother, A Woman of Uncertain Character (2007). There he describes joining the Communist Party at 15. Marc Cooper, reviewing the book for the Los Angeles Times, explained that "Nothing, he figured, could be a greater affront to Jennie, who was an ardent socialist but an even more ardent anti-Communist." During World War II, "The army saved my life," he later wrote. The high point of his time as a soldier in Occupied Germany, he later said, came when "I went AWOL to the Nuremberg War Crimes trial bent on shooting Hermann Goering." After the war he worked as an organizer in Detroit for the auto workers' union, but was expelled in a purge of communists and fellow travelers. He then moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under the G.I. Bill; he was managing editor of the student newspaper, the Daily Bruin. His "drinking buddies," he later wrote, "included the later Watergate conspirators, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, the latter of whom reported me regularly to the FBI."