Baker, Dorothy (1907–1968)

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Baker, Dorothy (1907–1968)

American novelist known for her depiction of an aging jazz trumpeter in Young Man with a Horn. Born Dorothy Dodds on April 21, 1907, in Missoula, Montana; died of cancer on June 17, 1968, in Terra

Bella, California; daughter of Raymond Branson Dodds and Alice (Grady) Dodds; educated at Occidental College and Whittier College; granted B.A., 1929, M.A., 1933, University of California, Los Angeles; married Howard Baker, on September 2, 1930; children: Ellen (b. 1940) and Joan (b. 1943).

Selected works:

Young Man with a Horn (1938); Trio (1943); Our Gifted Son (1948); The Street (1951); (with Howard Baker) The Ninth Day (1967); Cassandra at the Wedding (1962).

Though childhood study of the violin provided Dorothy Baker a musical background from which to build her novel Young Man with a Horn, no amount of training could account for what critics called an uncanny capacity to describe music and the emotional response it inspires. Loosely based on the life of jazz legend "Bix" Beiderbecke, Young Man marked a debut that Baker would struggle to equal for the remainder of her literary life.

She was born Dorothy Dodds on April 21, 1907, in Missoula, Montana. Railroad dispatcher Raymond Dodds moved his wife and daughter to California early in Dorothy's life so he could pursue the oil business. Encouraged toward music, Dorothy studied the violin throughout her childhood and shared her father's interest in jazz. Her penchant was more for languages, however, and she attended college at Occidental and Whittier before settling at the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduation in 1929, she began work on a master's degree in French. While studying in Paris in 1930, she met and married poet Howard Baker and wrote the first draft of a book she called Trio, but, once back home in California, she shelved the manuscript. While completing her master's degree, she began teaching at a small private school. Inspired by her experiences as a teacher, she wrote a short story, "A Glance Around," that The Magazine published in 1934. Encouraged, she quit her job to write full time.

Howard Baker's work as a literature professor led the couple to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Dorothy began writing about an aging jazz trumpeter. One hundred pages of the story earned her a 1937 Houghton Mifflin fellowship, which guaranteed publication. In 1938, Young Man with a Horn appeared to rave reviews. With critics and the reading public clamoring for her next effort, Baker dusted off Trio and began to revise it. Simultaneously, she worked on a movie script for Young Man, which had been sold to Hollywood. Actor Burgess Meredith was secured to play the lead, but the movie never received adequate funding and was abandoned. A similar fate awaited a theatrical version of the book. (However, in 1950, Young Man with a Horn, starring Kirk Douglas, Doris Day , and Lauren Bacall , was made into a successful film, famed for its extraordinary jazz soundtrack.)

In 1943, the response to the publication of Trio—the story of a college woman's rescue from her lesbian affair with a professor by a dashing young man—was decidedly cold, with critics maintaining that Baker had fallen far short of her obvious talent. Nevertheless, the Bakers retooled Trio for the stage and opened at the Belasco Theatre in New York City. Plagued by finances and controversy, Trio shut down.

The Bakers returned to California where they collaborated on the 1957 television drama The Ninth Day, and Dorothy wrote three more novels. Her last, Cassandra at the Wedding, again characterized a gay woman, whose twin sister is her personal and philosophical opposite. The book provoked debate for a second time in Baker's career but was successful enough to renew the author's reputation.