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A Renewed Friendship Inspires a First-Time Gift

4/23/2026

A Class of '55 alumnus reconnects through friendship and gives for the first time.

When Ian MacNiven ’55 looks back on his years as a Cranbrook student, he describes his experience as average. Arriving in 1952 in the 10^th grade, he faced a difficult transition to a new environment.

So, what inspired Ian to reconnect with the Schools last year and make his first gift to The Cranbrook Schools Fund?

Two classmates, their loyalty, and their 70^th reunion.

Traveling far and wide from Michigan as a professor and literary biographer, Cranbrook drifted from Ian’s thoughts. But in 2025, as the class of 1955 prepared for its 70^th reunion, class secretary Bill Raisch '55 invited classmates to share reflections on what Cranbrook meant to them. That outreach and the memories shared sparked a renewed correspondence between Ian and classmate Paul Dodyk '55.

“Writing back and forth, we in fact met a few months ago and had a lunch engagement. We hit it off,” he says of Paul.

Their reconnection sparked something in him.

“I want to do something, partly for Cranbrook, but mainly because I want to recognize that obviously the school means a lot to both of them,” he says. “I admire them for their old-school loyalty. It’s very much on a personal level. In terms of the friendships I made, I have nothing but the fondest feelings for a number of people.”

Ian’s life and career beyond Cranbrook have been anything but average. After graduation, he entered the University of Michigan, starting in engineering before eventually majoring in German, with a focus on language and literature. He started his engineering career in California but soon found the pull of writing and literature too strong to ignore.

“At Cranbrook, I felt the closest to [English faculty member] Carl Wonnberger, and became very interested in literature,” he recalls. “As a single child growing up in the bush in Suriname, going into town three times a year, hunting food to feed the family – as I happily did – it was the sort of upbringing that taught me to do anything that had to be done.”

That spirit of curiosity and courage led Ian to Southern Illinois University, where he volunteered to catalog the personal archive of author Lawrence Durrell. This work led to meeting Durrell and others in his literary circle and ultimately to becoming Durrell’s authorized biographer.

Along the way, Ian earned teaching Fulbright awards, beginning at the University of Costa Rica, before spending 24 years teaching at the State University of New York Maritime College, where he became an emeritus professor. Summers took him across Europe, India, and elsewhere, researching the literary subjects of his books.

His biography of Durrell, Lawrence Durrell: A Biography, was published in 1998 and recognized as a New York Times Notable Book, followed in 2014 by “Literchoor is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, which was nominated for the New York Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

“I have been very fortunate in the people I have been able to meet – Sir Ian McKellen, Yehudi Menuhin (Baron Menuhin), Mary de Rachewiltz (daughter of Ezra Pound), and the novelist Kay Boyle. I have had a lot of very fortunate contacts that were entirely due to work,” he says.

The relationships Ian made at Cranbrook continue to shape his life today. His first-time gift honors that enduring bond and reminds us that friendship and connection often reveal their presence in unexpected moments, even decades later.

It’s never too late to reconnect with Cranbrook Schools. Click here to learn more about giving.

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- Members (and spouses) of the Cranbrook Class of 1955 at reunion, including Bill Raisch (center).
- Ian with about ten percent of the books featured in his biography of Lawrence Durrell.