Clancy Sigal (September 6, 1926 – July 16, 2017)[1] 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).

[3] His father, Leo Sigal, and mother, Jennie Persily, were both labor organizers;[1][4] 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.

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.

"[7] 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.

[8] 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.

He was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he wrote in that book, but his hearing was abruptly cancelled.

The book is set in 1956 and tells the story of the author's drive from Los Angeles to New York "to look at America and figure out why it isn't my country any longer.

[11] John Leonard later wrote in the New York Times: "Better than any other document I know, Going Away identified, embodied and re‐created the postwar American radical experience.

Clancy Sigal brings the innocent and guilty back, once more, at close range, and proves himself the liveliest of literary nonagenarians in the process.