Dan Wakefield was a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. He began his writing career as a sports correspondent for The Indianapolis Star. Wakefield wrote for many national magazines including Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and GQ, and two of his novels, Going All the Way and Starting Over, were produced as feature films.

Wakefield won numerous honors including a Rockefeller grant for creative writing and a National Endowment for the Arts Award for the short story. He taught writing at Boston University, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, was a writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston, and a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Florida International University in Miami.