Carlos Baker

Carlos Baker
Born(1909-05-05)May 5, 1909
Biddeford, Maine
DiedApril 18, 1987(1987-04-18) (aged 77)
Princeton, New Jersey
EducationDartmouth 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 former Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. Baker was born in 1909 in Biddeford, Maine. He received his A.B. from Dartmouth College and his M.A. from Harvard University. He then received his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University in 1940 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The influence of Spenser on Shelley'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 of Ernest 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 of Martha Gellhorn", Hemingway's third 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 book How It Was that Hemingway deliberately chose someone who never knew him. Mary does not offer a specific reason for this choice; Baker had published Hemingway: The Writer as Artist in 1952, which favorably treated Hemingway's work to that date.

Baker's other major works included biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Baker's minor work includes A Year and A Day, Poems by Carlos Baker. Baker taught biographer A. 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 editor Maxwell Perkins.[4] Berg eventually expanded his thesis into the National Book Award-winning biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978), which he dedicated in part to Baker.[5]

Baker was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1982.[6] He died in 1987 at Princeton, New Jersey, aged 77.

  1. ^ Baker, Carlos Heard (1939). The influence of Spencer on Shelley's major poetry.
  2. ^ Kinnamon, Keneth (1996). "Hemingway and politics". In Donaldson, Scott (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 149–169. ISBN 978-0-521-45479-7. Retrieved August 26, 2024.
  3. ^ Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 320-322
  4. ^ Merritt, J. I. "Biographer A. Scott Berg '71 confronts the remarkable -- and still controversial -- flier, 'a great lens for observing the American century'", PAW, 1998-11-18. Retrieved on 2007-10-30.
  5. ^ Berg (1978.) Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, p. 455.
  6. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved June 6, 2022.