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American Literary Studies
Dorothy Dodds Baker and Howard Baker Papers
The Papers
Location of the Collection: Department of Special Collections,
Green Library
Call Number: M0903
Finding Guide: A printed version is available in the reading
room of the Department of Special Collections. Electronic versions
of this finding guide are also available. If you have Microsoft's
Internet Explorer version 6.0 or higher, click here
to connect to the XML version on the Stanford server; if not, click
here
for the html version on the Online Archives of California server.
Research Access and Use: Materials in the Department of
Special Collections are non-circulating and must be used in the
Special Collections' Reading Room in the Cecil H. Green Library.
The Reading Room is open 10:00am to 5:00pm Monday through Friday.
Photocopies, photographs, and microfilm can be made of some materials
in the collections. For more information about the collections and
access policies, please contact Special Collections by telephone
at (650) 725-1022, by electronic mail at speccollref@stanford.edu
or by regular mail at the Department of Special Collections, Stanford
University Libraries, Stanford, California 94305-6004.
Career of Dorothy Dodds Baker (1907 - 1968)
Novelist and dramatist, Dorothy Baker was born in 1907 in Missoula,
Montana and attended Whittier College before graduating from the
University of California, Los Angeles in 1929. There she met the
poet Howard Baker, whom she married in Paris in 1930. Upon their
return to the United States, she taught high school French and Spanish
in Oakland, CA and then returned to UCLA to complete her M. A. in
1934. Her first novel Young Man with a Horn (1938), later
made into a film by Kirk Douglas from her screenplay, won a Houghton
Mifflin Literature Fellowship. She subsequently received a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1942. Her next book was Trio (1943), which
she adapted into a play with her husband Howard Baker. The play
opened in December 1944 causing an immediate controversy and was
closed the following February as a result of a campaign mounted
against it by Protestant clergymen. She returned to the novel form
with Our Gifted Son (1948) and Cassandra at the Wedding
(1962). In 1967, she again collaborated with her husband to
produce the television play Ninth Day for the series Playhouse
90.
Career of Howard Baker (1905 - 1990)
Poet, dramatist, and literary critic, Howard Baker was born in
Philadelphia in 1905. In 1928 he received his Masters in English
from Stanford University, where he became friends with Yvor Winters
and served as co-editor of the literary magazine Gyroscope (1929-1930).
After graduating from Stanford, Baker moved to Paris to pursue his
studies at the Sorbonne. While living in France he met and was influenced
by the writers Ernest Hemingway and Ford Maddox Ford, who helped
him to publish his first work, the novel Orange Valley (1931).
Returning to the United States in 1931, he took a position teaching
English at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1937 to
1943 he taught English at Harvard University. In addition to the
collaborations with his wife, his writings include the poetry collections
Letter from the Country (1941) and Ode to the Sea
(1954).
Highlights and Research Potential of the Dorothy Dodds Baker and
Howard Baker Papers
The papers contain both published and unpublished manuscripts of
poetry, plays, fiction and essays by both authors. There is also
extensive correspondence with other writers, friends, and family,
including Janet Lewis, Caroline Gordon, Carson McCullers, Allen
Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Yvor Winters, and numerous others. Also
present are numerous manuscripts by other writers, some unpublished
and many in early drafts.
Selected Biography and Criticism
Contemporary Authors (Detroit, MI: Gale Research) New Revision
Series vol. 1, p 31. Brief biography of Dorothy Baker.
Related Manuscript Collections at Stanford
Janet Lewis (1899 - )
Stafford, Clayton
Donald E. Stanford (1913- )
Yvor Winters (1900 -1968)
Last modified:
July 3, 2006
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