Christopher Sale Wren
Thetford, VT – Christopher Sale Wren, a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times, as well as an author, alpinist, and songwriter, died at home in Thetford, VT, on February 15, 2026. He was 89.
Over the course of his career, he reported from throughout the Soviet Union (as it was then), Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, China, Southeast Asia, Canada, and South America, serving as the Times bureau chief in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa, and Johannesburg. He drew on that experience for some of his books, including his bestseller “The Cat Who Covered the World,” which told of the Wren family’s travels with their half-Siamese.
Among the major world events he covered were Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in 1977; the Iran hostage crisis in 1979; Nelson Mandela’s release from a South African prison in 1990; wars in Africa and the Balkans; and the trial of Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In the 1970s, while Wren was on a mountaineering expedition on Lenin Peak in the Soviet Pamirs, he and his teammates discovered the bodies of a Soviet all-female climbing team who had died in a blizzard; Soviet authorities had hushed the story up, and Wren broke the news of the tragedy on the Times’s front page.
Born in Hollywood, CA, Wren grew up on the West and East coasts. He majored in English at Dartmouth College, where he also studied Russian. He subsequently served with the U.S. Army in Korea and the U.S., including as a paratrooper and Green Beret.
After earning a master’s degree from Columbia School of Journalism, he began his career at Look Magazine, covering the American civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, among other topics.
He later worked at Newsweek, then joined the Times, which posted him to Moscow, U.S.S.R., in 1973. Moving with him were his wife, Jaqueline; his daughter, Celia; his son, Christopher; and Henrietta the cat.
In addition to his foreign postings, Wren worked for the New York Times in New York, serving for a time as assistant foreign editor and covering the United Nations. When Wren retired from the Times, he walked from the newspaper’s Manhattan offices to Fairlee, Vermont, a trip that became the basis of his book “Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains – a Homeward Adventure.”
Wren’s other books include the novel “Hacks” and the nonfiction books “Winners Got Scars Too: The Life and Legends of Johnny Cash,” “The End of the Line: The Failure of Communism in the Soviet Union and China,” “The Cat Who Covered the World: The Adventures of Henrietta and Her Foreign Correspondent,” and “Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom: Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys and the American Revolution.”
With his friend Jack Shepherd, he co-authored the novel “The Super Summer of Jamie McBride” and co-compiled two satirical quote anthologies: “Quotations from Chairman LBJ” and “The Almanack of Poor Richard Nixon.”
Wren was also a songwriter: His songs “Gospel Road” and “Jesus Was a Carpenter” were performed by Johnny Cash in the movie “The Gospel Road.”
Wren is survived by his wife; his daughter; and his granddaughters, Madeleine and Alexandra. (His son died in 2014.)
More information about his career may be found in his New York Times obituary (“Christopher S. Wren, Times Bureau Chief in Hostile Lands, Dies at 89”).
Donations in celebration of Christopher S. Wren’s life may be made to the Lucy Mackenzie Humane Society or the Vermont Historical Society.
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