‘Dorothy Dodds Baker – Missoula born “Scandalous” Author – Better than she thought’ – One of her novels, Young Man with a Horn, was made into a movie in 1950 starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day and Hoagy Carmichael.
Dorothy Dodds Baker – Scandalous Author – Better than she thought
One of her novels, Young Man with a Horn, was made into a movie in 1950 starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day and Hoagy Carmichael.
Dorothy Dodds Baker (1907–1968) was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1907 and raised in California. After graduating from UCLA in 1929, she traveled in France, where she began a novel and, in 1930, married the poet Howard Baker. The couple moved back to California, and Baker completed an MA in French, later teaching at a private school. After having a few short stories published, she turned to writing full time, despite, she would later claim, being “seriously hampered by an abject admiration for Ernest Hemingway.” In 1938, she published Young Man with a Horn, which was awarded the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 and, the next year, published Trio, a novel whose frank portrayal of a lesbian relationship proved too scandalous for the times; Baker and her husband adapted the novel as a play in 1944, but it was quickly shut down because of protests. Her final novel, Cassandra at the Wedding (also published as an NYRB Classic), examined the relationship between two exceptionally close sisters, whom Howard Baker asserted were based on both Baker herself and the couple’s two daughters. Baker died in 1968 of cancer.
Most of the information above is from a Dorothy Baker biography that appears on the goodreads.com site.[1]
Dorothy Baker was the author of four novels. One of her novels, Young Man with a Horn, was made into a movie in 1950 starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day and Hoagy Carmichael. One reviewer, Emily Cooke,[2] has found two of her books to be “witty and assured,” and her tone “dark but jaunty, the writing off-handedly smart.” While some of her writing dealt with sexual themes, which probably explains her lack of notoriety, her career seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts. In an interview in 1962 she explained that, in her mind, her career “had followed a ‘steady progression downhill’ and all in all she was ‘very sad and considerably depressed’ about her ‘so called career.’” Yet, at least one reviewer has found that Baker “wasn’t the failure she imagined being.”
Dorothy Baker’s family had a long history in Montana. Her Grandmother, Mrs. Clara Montana (Douglas) Grady of Missoula, was reputed to be the first white woman to be born in Virginia City, Montana in 1865. Clara Grady came to Missoula not long after the turn of the century and resided on Brooks St. in Missoula with her husband, T. C. Grady. She died in Missoula in 1922 and is buried in the city cemetery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Man_with_a_Horn_(film)