Kevin Baker (author)
Kevin Baker (born 1958) is an American novelist and journalist.
Biography
He was born in Englewood, New Jersey,[1] and grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts.[2][3] As a youth he worked on the local newspaper Gloucester Daily Times,[1] covering school-boy sports, as well as town meetings and other civic affairs. He graduated from Columbia University in 1980,[1] with a major in political science.[2]
Baker is the author of the City of Fire trilogy, published by HarperCollins, which consists of the following historical novels: Dreamland (1998); the bestselling Paradise Alley (2002); and Strivers Row (2006). The middle volume of the trilogy won the 2003 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction[4] and the 2003 American Book Award.[5]
Baker's first book, Sometimes You See it Coming (1993),[1] was a contemporary baseball novel loosely based on the life of Ty Cobb.[2] He also wrote a graphic novel, Luna Park (2009), with drawings by Croatian artist Danijel Žeželj.[6]
He was the chief historical researcher on Harold Evans’s illustrated history of the United States, The American Century (1998).[7] He was a columnist ("In the News") for American Heritage magazine from 1998 to 2007.[8] In 2009 appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and The Colbert Report, to discuss the Obama presidency.[9]
Baker is the author of America: The Story of Us (2010) and also wrote the new final chapter for the 2010 reissue of Baseball, the companion book to Ken Burns' 10-part film, Baseball, which aired on public television.
In 2014, Baker's historical novel The Big Crowd was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Scott Turow for The New York Times Book Review wrote: "Best of all, the novel delivers on what the title promises....I've read few other novels that portray, in such a nuanced way, the temptations of power, the complex division of control in a great metropolis and the perils of political deal-making in that environment."[10]
Baker resides in New York City, where he is a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine.[8] He is a regular contributor to The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.
Notes
- 1 2 3 4 "Kevin (Breen) Baker." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Retrieved via Biography in Context database 2016-06-19.
- 1 2 3 Shafner, Rhonda (December 29, 2002). "At Home with History: Books Have Long Taken Writer Kevin Baker into the Past." Reading Eagle (Reading, Pa.). Retrieved via Google News 2016-06-19.
- ↑ "Kevin Baker – About." Kevin Baker [author's website]. kevinbaker.info. Retrieved 2016-06-19.
- ↑ "James Fenimore Cooper Prize." Society of American Historians. Retrieved 2016-06-19.
- ↑ "Before Columbus Foundation Presents the American Book Awards 2003" [press release]. Before Columbus Foundation. Available as PDF file on the foundation's website (www.beforecolumbusfoundation.com). Retrieved 2016-06-19.
- ↑ Kois, Dan (January 13, 2010). "Book World reviews the graphic novel 'Luna Park' by Kevin Baker" [book review]. Washington Post.
- ↑ Reynolds, David S. (October 11, 1998). "The March of Time: The American Century by Harold Evans with Gail Buckland and Kevin Baker" [book review]. New York Times. "... with the help of a research team headed by Kevin Baker, [Evans] has culled a staggering amount of information from other history books."
- 1 2 "Kevin (Breen) Baker." The Writers Directory. Detroit: St. James Press, 2016. Retrieved via Biography in Context database 2016-06-19.
- ↑ "Book Discussion on Barack Hoover Obama" (June 21, 2009). C-SPAN. www.c-span.org. Retrieved 2016-06-19.
- ↑ Turow, Scott (September 13, 2013). "On the Waterfront and Elsewhere: 'The Big Crowd', A Novel by Kevin Baker". New York Times. Retrieved 2016-06-19. Print version appeared on September 15, 2013.