Carlos Baker | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1909-05-05)May 5, 1909 |
| Died | April 18, 1987(1987-04-18) (aged 77) |
| Education | Dartmouth College (A.B.),Harvard University.Princeton University |
| Occupation(s) | Writer and professor |
Carlos Baker (May 5, 1909 – April 18, 1987) was an American writer, biographer and formerWoodrow Wilson Professor of Literature atPrinceton University. Baker was born in 1909 inBiddeford,Maine. He received hisA.B. fromDartmouth College and hisM.A. fromHarvard University. He then received hisPh.D. in English fromPrinceton University in 1940 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The influence of Spenser onShelley's major poetry."[1] Baker's published works included several novels and books of poetry and various literary criticisms and essays.
In 1969, Baker published the well-regarded scholarly biography ofErnest Hemingway,Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, describing him as a "fierce individualist ... who believed that that government is best which governs least".[2] In "Selected Letters ofMartha Gellhorn", Hemingway'sthird wife, Gellhorn criticizes Baker's assertions concerning her affair and marriage to Hemingway, and indicates that Baker was frequently wrong about those matters she experienced personally, and which Baker wrote about.[3] Hemingway never met Baker according to Hemingway's fourth wife,Mary Welsh Hemingway, who also asserts in her 1976 bookHow It Was that Hemingway deliberately chose someone who never knew him. Mary does not offer a specific reason for this choice; Baker had publishedHemingway: The Writer as Artist in 1952, which favorably treated Hemingway's work to that date.
Baker's other major works included biographies ofPercy Bysshe Shelley andRalph Waldo Emerson. Baker's minor work includesA Year and A Day, Poems by Carlos Baker. Baker taught biographerA. Scott Berg while Berg was an undergraduate at Princeton in the late 1960s. Berg recalled that Baker "changed my life", and convinced him to quit acting to concentrate on his thesis, a study of editorMaxwell Perkins.[4] Berg eventually expanded his thesis into theNational Book Award-winning biographyMax Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978), which he dedicated in part to Baker.[5]
Baker was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1982.[6] He died in 1987 atPrinceton, New Jersey, aged 77.
