“Families are like rivers, they go on and on, pooling here, tumbling there, as they flow toward a distant sea,” John Sedgwick wrote to open the final chapter of “In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in An American Family,” his monumental 2007 memoir.
Currents carrying generations toward their destinies could be swift and occasionally treacherous — lifting some Sedgwicks to lasting prominence, dipping others into rapids of despair. Perhaps that was no surprise, he wrote: “For the Sedgwick story is the story of America.”
Though he was best-known for his memoir, its first chapter as bracing and heartbreaking a first-person account of a mental health crisis as anyone will ever read, that work’s writerly bookend, in a manner of speaking, was “The Eternity Club.”
His lively New England Monthly magazine article introduced readers to his extended family’s quirky burial plot in Stockbridge, with its concentric circle layout that led it to be known as “the Sedgwick pie” — a final resting place for generations that produced judges and politicians, writers and actors. The 1989 account glows with the knowing, winking humor Mr. Sedgwick could bring to any topic, including his family’s storied Brahmin history dating back to just after the Mayflower arrived.
“It’s so well-written on the sentence level,” the writer Anne Fadiman, a longtime close friend, said of the magazine article. “The grace of his prose is something I think we’ve forgotten, in our hasty time, as writers and readers.”
Mr. Sedgwick, whose memoir chronicled mental health struggles of relatives recent and ancient, including a few who ended their lives, died Aug. 30 in his home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y.
He was 72 and “ultimately succumbed to the illness that he spent so many words trying to understand,” his daughter, Sara Sedgwick Brown, wrote in a series of interviews and written exchanges for her father’s obituary.
“Does someone’s end define their whole life? For him, it’s not true,” she said by phone a few days ago. “He was a person who was aware of darkness and sadness, but very much lived a life of joy. He was a very funny, happy person who was pursuing hard things.”
In Mr. Sedgwick’s articles, novels, and memoir, some topics and people appeared more than once in different forms.
His 2002 novel “The Education of Mrs. Bemis,” which Globe reviewer Scott Helman called “warm and fulfilling,” drew inspiration from the “family disease” of depression and mental illness that Mr. Sedgwick explored so fully in his memoir. The character Mrs. Bemis was a fictional version of the author’s mother.
“The novel was brought on by the experience of placing my aging mother in McLean Hospital, near Boston, for depression in the long, sorry aftermath of my father’s death,” Mr. Sedgwick wrote in 2002, in a New York Times “Writers on Writing” essay. “That was, needless to say, a difficult time for both of us. Yet as it was happening, all I could think was that it was a fine setup for a piece of fiction.”
No matter the topic, the quality of his writing was key to him at every juncture, at every age.
As a 9-year-old he built a little cabin by a pond on land his family owned in New Hampshire, a sort of prototype for writing rooms he would inhabit in the decades ahead.
“He always was so happy writing,” said Sara, who lives in Newton. “He said, ‘I knew from the beginning what I wanted to do.’”
During more than 50 years as a published writer, Mr. Sedgwick was a masterful practitioner of literary journalism that filled glossy magazines before many shuttered in the internet age.
Praised by critics for his articles and novels, Mr. Sedgwick also was professionally successful.
While many contemporaries augmented writing income with teaching or editing jobs, “he was one of the last of our group who was actually able to make a living with his pen,” Fadiman said.
Mr. Sedgwick “had an array of talents, and he could be funny as well as searingly honest,” said Cullen Murphy, an Atlantic magazine editor-at-large.
“He could also, in his writing, bring the most unexpected subjects to life,” Murphy added. “He once proposed an article on cement — just plain old cement. I’m not sure we would have assigned it to anyone except John. And he delivered a glorious and entertaining piece that opened up a whole world, one that most of us had never thought about before even though it’s under our feet and in our walls and above our heads.”
John Shaw Sedgwick was born in Boston on May 5, 1954, and grew up in Dedham. He and his brother and sister were from the second marriage of their father, Robert Minturn Sedgwick, an investment adviser.
Mr. Sedgwick’s mother, Emily Ames Lincoln Sedgwick, was a competitive tennis player, which John pursued somewhat less successfully. She won the women’s singles state championship in 1939, three years after graduating from Smith College.
Among the literary branches of Mr. Sedgwick’s family tree were the 19th-century author Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Ellery Sedgwick, who owned and edited The Atlantic Monthly for 30 years in the early 1900s.
Mr. Sedgwick followed family members to the private Groton School and to Harvard College, graduating in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in English.
For a while, he lived in a Radcliffe dorm next door to Fadiman. They collaborated on an Esquire magazine article about bathroom graffiti, some of it X-rated, that they found at Harvard.
“He was so funny,” she recalled of their Harvard days, and added that Mr. Sedgwick had a disarming presence, “as if he was saying, ‘Yes, I may be a Sedgwick and really handsome and a tennis champion but … aw shucks.’”
From the beginning until the very end, Fadiman said, “life seemed so precious and vivid and wonderful to John.”
His other books included the novel “The Dark House” (2001); “Night Vision: Confessions of Gil Lewis, Private Eye” (1982), which drew from his reporting for The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper in Boston; and “War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation” (2015).
Mr. Sedgwick’s first marriage, to Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Megan Marshall, ended in divorce in 2007 after 27 years.
Their daughters Sara and Josephine, who lives in Brooklyn, “are thoroughly adorable as only one’s own kids can be,” he wrote for the 25th annual report of his Harvard class.
In 2013, Mr. Sedgwick married Rana Foroohar, a Financial Times columnist who lives in Brooklyn.
Along with Rana and his two daughters, Mr. Sedgwick leaves two stepchildren, Darya and Alex Foroohar; a brother, Robert of Short Hills, N.J.; a sister, Emily of Jamaica Plain; and six grandchildren.
In a particularly prescient passage in “The Eternity Club,” Mr. Sedgwick described what he imagined would be the procession to his Saturday burial place in the Sedgwick pie.
“When I die, I will be placed in a coffin and wheeled down Main Street in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in an open horse-drawn cart adorned with hemlock boughs and sprigs of flowers,” he wrote.
“My surviving family and friends will trail behind me — weeping, I assume, profusely. The funeral procession will pause for a moment of silence before the family’s ancestral house, then slowly make its way to the town cemetery and down a gravel path to the family’s private burial ground ...”
Those who knew Mr. Sedgwick as he coped with health challenges were always impressed at “how resilient he had been,” said Fadiman, who added: “I think of him as a strong person.”
With his memoir “In My Blood,” she said, “he gave the genre of family history something more rigorous and braver than the usual, and at considerable cost to him.”
Yet in all of Mr. Sedgwick’s writing, “his words brought joy to himself first and foremost, and then to everybody else,” Sara said. “I think he would be grateful to have that brought forward.”
He was, she said, “a seeker of joy.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.