Kevin Baker (born 1958) is an American novelist, political commentator, and journalist.

Kevin Baker
Baker in 2015
Born	1958 (age 63–64)[1] Englewood, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist historian journalist political commentator
Education	Columbia University
Genre	Realistic fiction, historical fiction, Nonfiction
Website
kevinbaker.info

Early life

Baker 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]

Career

In 1993, Baker's first book, Sometimes You See it Coming (1993),[1] a contemporary baseball novel loosely based on the life of Ty Cobb, was published.[2]

He was the chief historical researcher on Harold Evans’s illustrated history of the United States, The American Century (1998).[4] He was a columnist ("In the News") for American Heritage magazine from 1998 to 2007.[5] In 2009 appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and The Colbert Report, to discuss the Obama presidency.[6]

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[7] and the 2003 American Book Award.[8] Paradise Alley was also chosen by bestselling Angela's Ashes author, Frank McCourt, as a Today show book club selection.

In 2009, he wrote a Luna Park, a graphic novel illustrated by Croatian artist Danijel Žeželj.[9]

A writer of over 200 newspaper and magazine articles, Baker was the recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim fellowship for non-fiction.

Baker lives in New York City, where he is a contributing editor to and bi-monthly columnist for Harper's Magazine,[5] and a regular contributor to Politico.com, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The New York Times Book Review.

Bibliography

• Sometimes You See It Coming (1993)
• The American Century (1998; with Harold Evans and Gail Buckland)
• Dreamland (1999)
• Paradise Alley (2002)
• “Rudy Giuliani and the Myth of Modern New York” (2005; in America's Mayor: The Hidden History of Giuliani's New York)
• “Lost-Found Nation: The Last Meeting Between Elijah Muhammad and W.D. Fard" (2006; in I Wish I'd Been There)
• Strivers Row (2006)
• Luna Park (2011; with artist Danijel Žeželj)
• The Big Crowd (2013)
• Becoming Mr. October (2014)
• America The Ingenious: How a nation of dreamers, immigrants, and tinkerers changed the world (2016)

References

Further reading

• Kevin Baker's Personal Website