Dorothy Baker
Dorothy Baker (1907–1968) was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1907 and raised in California. After graduating from UCLA , she traveled in France, where she began a novel and, in 1930, married the poet Howard Baker. The couple moved back to California, and Baker completed an MA in French, later teaching at a private school. After having a few short stories published, she turned to writing full time, despite, she would later claim, being “seriously hampered by an abject admiration for Ernest Hemingway.” In 1938, she published Young Man with a Horn, which was awarded the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 and, the next year, published Trio, a novel whose frank portrayal of a lesbian relationship proved too scandalous for the times; Baker and her husband adapted the novel as a play in 1944, but it was quickly shut down because of protests. Her final novel, Cassandra at the Wedding (also published as an NYRB Classic), examined the relationship between two exceptionally close sisters, whom Howard Baker asserted were based on both Baker herself and the couple’s two daughters. Baker died in 1968 of cancer.
“Who am I? Or possibly, who AM I? Make it who I WAS, because once I was somebody.”
“You shouldn't ask me whether I like him or not. The way you mean it, I don't suppose I like anybody.”
“There's nothing hard about it. But I get praised for the hardest of things I do, and I do some of the hardest of things. Things like waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night, all alone except for when I'm with someone; and it's getting harder and harder.”
“So go, girl. We should have been one person all along, not two.”