Dan Wakefield

Dan Wakefield worked in American fiction, journalism, screenwriting, and memoir, often examining postwar relationships and changing social expectations. Starting Over follows divorced Phil Potter as the freedom he imagines in the 1970s proves lonelier and more complicated than expected. Home Free turns to Gene Barrett, a drifting student whose cross-country movement within the 1960s counterculture becomes a reckoning with responsibility and belonging. Barnes & Noble directly links Starting Over with Wakefield and describes its comic focus on divorce and reinvention. Open Road Media independently publishes Home Free and describes its movement from Boston through Maine, Iowa, and California. Together, the novels show Wakefield using different decades to test American promises of personal freedom. His journalistic eye gives their settings social detail, while flawed protagonists keep the books grounded in consequences. Readers can trace how work, love, mobility, and self-deception shape two very different attempts to begin again.