Russell baker biography memoir

Growing Up

September 12,
For the solar eclipse last month, my family traveled to the friendly little town of Benton, KY, which was in the path of totality. I love to visit the public library wherever I may be, so that was our first stop. I was drawn like a magnet to a few shelves set aside for an ongoing book sale. Hardbacks were a quarter, paperbacks just a dime. Well, you can't beat those prices! One of my treasures was the autobiography "Growing Up" by Russell Baker, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in I know I read it all those years ago, but it was so long ago, my only memory was of an engaging read. So, I read it againand that is something I seldom do. (I have so very many books to read, I don't usually re-read, no matter how much I may have liked a book.) My memory had not been wrongthe book was just as delightful as I recalled. Mr. Baker (who is apparently still alive, now 92 years old) was born in , just a year before my mother. These were children who grew up during the Depression and those experiences colored the rest of their lives. Mr. Baker's father died in a diabetic coma (before insulin treatments had been developed) when Russell was five years old. He included his very early memories of his father and his father's people, but the book really centers on his mother. The book opens and closes with her as an elderly woman with dementia. In between those bookends, his life is unfolded for us in vivid vignettes about all of his colorful family members. The family is affectionately but sharply drawn, so the reader almost feels as though she is sitting around the table with them as they have a meal or play cards. After his father died, his mother took her two oldest children, Russell and his younger sister, Doris, to live with one of her brothers. (She left the baby, who was 10 months old, with one of her husband's brothers and his wife who had not been able to have children. She made that decision at a time of enormous stress and perhaps later regre
  • Growing up by russell baker summary

    • The Good Times

    August 16,
    Russell Baker demonstrated that a good writer can craft more than one enduring memoir, focusing on different stages or tasks, in one’s life. Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Growing Up was published in Growing Up describes Baker’s childhood and young adulthood, revealing how the author and his family survived the Depression and World War II. The Good Times was published seven years later in The Good Times catalogs Russell’s education and developing career as a newspaper reporter, columnist, and author.
    Both of Baker’s memoirs include descriptions of Russell’s relationship with multiple family members and friends. The main theme of Growing Up, the relationship of Russell with his mother, is more of a subplot to The Good Times. Both books provide important insights into mother–son dynamics. Baker’s memoirs document the lifelong (and even after death) effect of a mother’s influence on the life of her son (magnified in Russell’s case by the early death of his father, when Russell was only six). “My mother, dead now to this world but still roaming free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak”… with her oft-repeated wisdom:
    • “… Russell, you’ve got no more gumption than a bump on a log.”
    • “Don’t you want to amount to something?”
    • “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a quitter.”
    • “Have a little ambition, Buddy.”
    • “Sometimes you act like you’re not worth the powder to blow you up…”
    • “Edwin James (Baker’s cousin who became the Editor of The New York Times, and therefore, the paragon of literary success for Russell’s mother) is no smarter than anyone else… and look where he is today…”
    • “My God, Russell, you don’t know any more about humanity’s dreams and sorrow than a hog knows about holiday.”
    • “You might as well blow your own horn because nobody’s going to blow it for you”
    The Good Times also documents, in Baker’s satirical and humorous style, the impact of the second most important relationship in his life – the re

    Russell Baker

    American writer and satirist (–)

    For the investigative journalist, see Russ Baker. For the aviator, see Russ Baker (pilot).

    Russell Wayne Baker (August 14, – January 21, ) was an American journalist, narrator, writer of Pulitzer Prize-winning satirical commentary and self-critical prose, and author of Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Growing Up (). He was a columnist for The New York Times from to , and hosted the PBS show Masterpiece Theatre from to The Forbes Media Guide Five Hundred, stated: "Baker, thanks to his singular gift of treating serious, even tragic events and trends with gentle humor, has become an American institution."

    Early life and education

    Born in Loudoun County, Virginia, Baker was the son of Benjamin Rex Baker and Lucy Elizabeth (née Robinson). At the age of eleven, as a self-professed "bump on a log", Baker decided to become a writer at such an early age since he figured "what writers did couldn't even be classified as work".

    He attended and graduated from Baltimore City College in (a "magnet" secondary school with selective admissions. The school has a big influence on the young Baker, and he wrote extensively about his youth in Baltimore and his experiences there at the nicknamed "Castle on the Hill" four decades later in his best-selling first memoir Growing Up, one of seventeen books he was to later write.

    Leaving high school at "City" in , he took a scholarship nearby to Johns Hopkins University also in Baltimore, studying for one year before leaving to join the United States Navy in the middle of World War II (/) as a pilot in naval aviation. He left the service in and continued his coursework for two more years for a degree in English at Johns Hopkins ], graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in

    Career

    Journalism

    In , Baker took a job at The Evening Sun, (one of the three "Baltimore Sunpapers"). Baker started out as a nig

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  • Growing up by russell baker

    • Baker was born on August 14, , in Loudoun County. His father, Benjamin, was a stonemason who died in a diabetic coma when Baker was five, leaving the family in poverty. Baker and his mother, Lucy Baker, moved to New Jersey to live with her brother. They were forced to live on the generosity of relatives until his mother remarried when Baker was a teenager.

    Always an excellent student, Baker won a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, but he left after one year to join the U.S. Navy Air Force in World War II (–) ended before he saw combat, so Baker returned to Johns Hopkins, graduated in , and began a career as a journalist with the Baltimore Sun. From until , Baker was the Sun&#;s London bureau chief. In , he returned to the United States and became the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the New York Times. He left this position in and began to write the acclaimed &#;Observer&#; column for the Times. The column appeared three times a week for more than three decades, making it one of the longest-running columns ever. In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary for his &#;Observer&#; column. Baker married Miriam Emily Nash, of Camden, New Jersey, in They had three children. She died in In , Baker returned to Virginia and settled in Leesburg.

    Baker produced a variety of other writing while he worked for the Times. Six collections of short pieces, including some of the &#;Observer&#; columns, were published between and In , Baker&#;s autobiography Growing Up was published, and the first chapters deal with his boyhood in the mountains of rural Virginia. Richard Lingeman described the book in a review in the New York Times: &#;Instead of being a grim tale of drunken stepmothers and battered stepfathers, Growing Up is touching and funny, a hopeless muddle of sadness and laughter that bears a suspicious resemblance to real life.&#; The memoir won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in Two additional volumes of autobiogr