John Sedgwick was 6 when he was introduced to the family plot in Stockbridge, Mass.
He and his siblings and cousins had been playing hide-and-seek in the town cemetery and were shooed away by a groundskeeper, whereupon John’s step-grandmother, who was leading the game, declared, “All right then, we’ll go play in our graveyard.”
That would be the Sedgwick Pie, so named for its unusual layout: graves planted in concentric circles around a central monument, a stately granite obelisk marking the plot of the family patriarch, Theodore Sedgwick. Otherwise known as the Judge, Theodore was a staunch federalist and ambitious politician who had fought in the Revolutionary War. His second wife, Pamela, was buried alongside him, under a modest urn. Nearby lay Elizabeth Freeman, also known as Mumbet, a formidable formerly enslaved woman whom the Judge had represented in a lawsuit against her enslaver; when she won her freedom, she asked to come work for his family, and she remained with them until her death.
Radiating out from that first circle were the weather-stained headstones of five more generations of illustrious, accomplished Sedgwicks — authors, editors, lawyers, politicians and eccentrics — “a whole little city of Sedgwicks,” as John told WGBH-FM years later, “taking their heavenly rest.”
At first, he was entranced. His initial foray into the Pie, through a stand of Norwegian spruce trees, was like entering a magic kingdom. But by the time he was a teenager, he found himself irritated by what he felt it represented: unseemly ancestor worship.
The plot’s nickname, it turned out, was a joke, bestowed by a sneering neighbor in the late 19th century. So was the legend that accompanied it — that on Judgment Day, the denizens of the Pie would rise up to face not their maker, but their patriarch. Sedgwicks of yore had been irritated by the slur and the fiction, but the name stuck and later generations embraced it.
Mr. Sedgwick wore his patrimony lightly and ironically, and often wrote about it, chronicling the curious family funeral tradition involving a horse-drawn cart holding a Pie-bound Sedgwick tucked into a simple wood coffin that was covered with a deep red pall. (His father, in what is perhaps an apocryphal tale, is said to have ordered such coffins by the brace so that future Sedgwicks wouldn’t be caught short.)
For an article in New England Monthly, Mr. Sedgwick described how early Pie inhabitants had been buried in their pajamas; his family, he noted, seemed to view death as a kind of slumber party. So he bought himself a silky, Hugh Hefner-style dressing gown to be photographed in for the accompanying images, lampooning his family’s quaint customs and the WASPy proclivity for tattered, moth-eaten garments by sporting a luxurious robe that, as he later wrote, was “to die for. And in.”
But when he turned 46, that patrimony had become a darker, more pernicious burden. By then, Mr. Sedgwick was a well-respected journalist and a prolific author working on his second novel, about an older society woman who has suffered a breakdown and her relationship with the psychiatric nurse who treats her at an old-line mental hospital. He modeled the protagonist on his mother, Emily Ames (Lincoln) Sedgwick, who was then in the midst of her fourth hospitalization for depression at McLean, the leafy refuge in a Boston suburb that famously treated Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor and others, including a clutch of Sedgwicks, for what Winston Churchill called the “black dog.”
It was the turn of the millennium, and Mr. Sedgwick had begun to feel untethered himself. Plagued by racing thoughts and worn ragged from weeks without sleep, he was ineluctably drawn, as his mother had been, to the idea of his own demise as a cure for what was bedeviling him. Medication and therapy eventually brought him back from the brink.
Then his half brother, Harry, called one day to reveal that he had been ensnared by the same malady, and offered some insights into the Sedgwick legacy: Woven through all that privilege, it seemed, was a parallel history of mood disorders and suicides — more than the usual family complement, according to his psychiatrist.
Think of Edie, Harry said, the beautiful, doomed Warhol muse and Vogue model who overdosed at 28, the third tragic death in her immediate family. And her erratic father, Francis, who spent time at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Western Massachusetts’s answer to McLean; in 1921, a doctor had diagnosed him as suffering from “manic-depressive psychosis,” a relatively new entry in the psychiatric lexicon, and urged him not to have children. (He went on to have eight.) And their paternal grandfather, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, who had nearly killed himself after a love affair gone awry. And cousin Louis Agassiz Shaw II, who strangled the family maid and spent decades in a book-lined suite at Upham Memorial Hall, a building on the McLean campus known as the Harvard Club because it housed so many of the school’s alumni. And so many others.
“I think we’ve got the family disease,” Harry Sedgwick told John, who realized then that he also had the subject for his next book.
Sedgwick history was a rich topic — the first Sedgwick landed in Massachusetts in 1635 or 1636 — but it had already been amply documented. And John, unlike others in his family, was a bit embarrassed by it, until he thought about investigating that history through this dark lens.
Was the secret to the Sedgwicks’ notable successes and equally impressive downfalls more than just a natural tendency toward ambition and its perils? Could the waxing and waning of moods and fortunes be attributed to the peaks and valleys of manic depression?
“In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family,” Mr. Sedgwick’s critically acclaimed 2007 memoir — The Boston Globe likened its epic scope to that of a great novel — was the result of his investigation.
“I was a Sedgwick, guilty as charged,” he concluded. “I could never peer into my own soul and find nothing, for my soul is not entirely my own.”
Mr. Sedgwick died on Aug. 30 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 72.
“He succumbed to the illness that he had tried so hard to understand,” his daughter Sara Sedgwick Brown said in an interview. “Like many joyful, funny people — they are that way because they know the alternative very deeply.”
She added, “To be a Sedgwick is an elusive thing. It can be a trap. All of us struggle with the idea of privilege: What does it afford us and what does it mean?”
Mr. Sedgwick liked to say that he had been raised by the “last Victorian” because his father, Robert Minturn Sedgwick, an investment adviser known as Duke, was born near the end of that era in 1899. John and his two siblings were his second family; by the time John came along, Duke was 55.
Duke was a proud, lifelong tender of the Sedgwick flame. In the 1940s, he raised $4,000 from family members to buy the Old House, the family manse that the Judge had built in Stockbridge, from a relative, and he established a trust for its upkeep. Since then, one Sedgwick or another has been in residence, paying a modest rent and making the house available for family weddings, funerals and reunions.
Duke’s favorite poem was “If—,” Rudyard Kipling’s ode to manhood, which he framed and hung on his bedroom wall. Every morning, he played “Old Man River” while doing his exercises — calisthenics drawn from the Canadian Mounties handbook. He was as devoted to his schools as he was to his family history, wearing his Groton blazer until it was threadbare and recounting plays from his Harvard football career at cocktail parties.
John, a child of the 1960s, was not exactly enchanted by these fusty behaviors. At Groton, it was hard to escape the names of relatives whose deeds were emblazoned on plaques everywhere. He rebelled with typical mischief. Instead of turning in the required essay for an assignment in a religious studies class, he submitted a single, angry sentence: “I read the book, OK?”
At Harvard, where he earned a degree in English in 1977, he boarded at Radcliffe — that’s where the girls were — and ignored an invitation to join the Porcellian Club, the college’s exclusive “final” club revered by his father, whose collection of tchotchkes featuring pigs, the club’s emblem, threatened to overrun the family’s home in Dedham, Mass.
For one of his first national magazine assignments, an article in Esquire published the year he graduated, John and the author Anne Fadiman, a former housemate, mocked the institution by conducting a textual analysis of its bathroom graffiti. They sorted their material into nine genres, including the archly titled Arse Poetica, which included this doggerel:
She offered her honor, He honored her offer, And all night long, It was honor and offer.
Mr. Sedgwick went on to contribute to GQ, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic, among other publications. A series about a private investigator written for The Real Paper, an alternative weekly in Boston, became his first book, “Night Vision,” in 1982. “Rich Kids” (1985) explored the lives of young heirs, a subject of interest, he said, because he saw himself as a “rich kid manqué,” as he put it, or someone on the margins of wealth. (During the course of his research, word got out that he was an actual rich kid, and he became the object of a few unwelcome solicitations, including one from a man who asked him to back a Broadway musical.)
“He was witty and empathetic,” Ms. Fadiman said. “He could charm anyone into talking to him. I think that’s what made him such a good reporter: Everyone wanted to be with him.”
Like most family memoirs, his book was not universally beloved by his extended clan, though many Sedgwicks had helped with the research. One cousin recalled his mother angrily scribbling corrections in the book’s margins.
“I was very pleased that it was a success,” Robert Sedgwick, John’s older brother, said in an interview. “Other people were less enthusiastic.”
Mr. Sedgwick, who was born John Shaw Sedgwick on May 5, 1954, in Boston, wrote three books of history in addition to his memoir: “War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation” (2015); “Blood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation” (2018), a biography of two rival Native American chiefs; and “From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West” (2021).
His marriage to Megan Marshall, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Margaret Fuller, ended in 2007. He married Rana Foroohar, a columnist for The Financial Times, in 2013.
In addition to his daughter Sara and his brother Robert, Ms. Foroohar survives him, along with another daughter, Josephine Sedgwick; two stepchildren, Darya and Alex Foroohar; six grandchildren; and a sister, Emily.
At his death, he was working on what he described as a Hitchcockian novel of psychological suspense. “He was very excited about it,” Daniel Conaway, his literary agent, said.
Editors were always pestering Mr. Sedgwick to write something called “The Last WASP,” the author Pagan Kennedy said, but it wasn’t clear who, exactly, that would be.
“When he died, I thought maybe he was the last WASP,” she added. “He knew he had been documenting a culture in decline, which was what made his work so interesting. And he did it so well because he was deeply of it, but still outside of it.”
This month, Mr. Sedgwick will be buried at the Pie, with all the bells and whistles that accompany that particular Sedgwick tradition: the horse-drawn cart, the red pall and his daughters taking on the role that their grandfather once played, leading the procession from the church to the gravesite.
“I’m puzzled by what he would make of it,” his daughter Sara said. “It’s the most extreme version of the tension he carried his whole life — the deep sadness and the joy that is living, the celebration. He’d think, ‘Let’s have the best party ever,’ and be so sad he wasn’t there to say or do something irreverent.”
Mr. Sedgwick had long ago made peace with his patrimony, which he came to see as a boon rather than a curse.
“I see the oscillation of mood, the up-down-up-down, of the family as its quavering vitality,” he wrote in his memoir. “Nothing in life remains static, or it is not life at all. It is like music: The sound requires vibration; the music dies when the string is still.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
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