Howard Baker (April 5, 1905 – July 1990) was an American poet, dramatist, and literary critic.

Baker was born in Philadelphia. He did graduate work in English at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, where he befriended Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters

Arthur Yvor Winters was an American poet and literary critic.-As modernist:Winters's early poetry, which appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, was written in the modernist idiom, and was heavily influenced both by Native American...

 and was co-editor of the literary magazine Gyroscope. After getting his master's degree, he moved to Paris to pursue his studies at the Sorbonne

Sorbonne

The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...

. There he married the novelist Dorothy Baker

Dorothy Baker

-Early life:She was born Dorothy Dodds on April 21, 1907 in Missoula, Montana and raised in California. Baker attended Whittier College, then transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, from which she graduated in 1929...

 and met and was influenced by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

 and Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

, who helped him to publish his first work, the autobiographical novel Orange Valley (1931). After returning to the United States in 1931, he took a position teaching English at Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

. From 1937 to 1943 he taught English at Harvard

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. Besides collaborations with his wife, his writings include the poetry collections Letter from the Country (1941) and Ode to the Sea (1954), as well as a collection of essays on ancient Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

culture, Persephone's Cave: Cultural Accumulations of the Early Greeks (1979).

Research resources

• The papers of Dorothy and Howard Baker, 1926-1990 (33 linear ft.) are housed in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries

External links

• Dorothy and Howard Baker bios from Stanford