Background
She was born Dorothy Dodds on April 21, 1907 in Missoula, Montana and raised in California.
She was born Dorothy Dodds on April 21, 1907 in Missoula, Montana and raised in California.
She studied the violin until she went to college, and she was interested in jazz most of her life. She received her B. A. in 1929 from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her bachelor of education in 1930 from Occidental College in Los Angeles. In college she was especially interested in languages, particularly French. She earned her M. A. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1934.
She traveled to Paris and began to write a novel about an unusual romantic triangle set in a college town. The Bakers next moved to Cambridge, Massachussets, where Howard Baker was an instructor in English at Harvard from 1937 until 1943. They then returned to California, settling in Terra Bella, where they raised oranges, olives, and cattle. "When I first began to write, " Baker recalled, "I was seriously hampered by an abject admiration for Ernest Hemingway, and I found that the only way I could grow up and get over it was simply to quit writing any direct discourse. " She said she studied the nonfiction method of film critic Otis Ferguson. "In fiction I admire above all else simplicity and clarity in both phrase and story, " she commented. She also was grateful for the constant helpful criticism of her husband and of Yvor Winters, the poet and critic. Baker's major work was Young Man with a Horn (1938), a sensitive, expert novel about jazz music and musicians. Clifton Fadiman believed it "darned near perfect. " The novel, inspired by the jazz music of Leon (Bix) Beiderbecke, was true to the lives and to the music of real jazz musicians. " The book, a best-seller, was turned into a popular Warner Brothers motion picture in 1950 with Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, and Hoagy Carmichael. Baker's writing experiments in Paris in 1930 resulted in her 1943 novel Trio and her (and her husband's) 1944 play of the same title. The novel and the play dealt honestly with a mature woman's mental and sexual control over a female student. Eventually the girl breaks away from the relationship through the intervention of a young man with whom she is in love. Over all the years devoted to Trio, Baker seems to have struggled for a perfect form. She did not fully succeed. Reviewer John Chamberlain thought the novel "first-rate" technically, but "hardly worth a decade of agonizing over its form and content. " Whereas the novel Trio was called theatrical, the play was at least once called novelistic. In his review, Stark Young noted that "the play itself went slow at times, as if it were a novel. " The play premiered on December 29, 1944, and ran for sixty-seven performances at the Belasco Theater in New York City. It was forced to close after the city's license commissioner, who considered the play immoral, declared the Belasco's license forfeit unless Trio was withdrawn. Baker also wrote the novels Our Gifted Son (1948) and Cassandra at the Wedding (1962). In addition, she wrote, with her husband, a television play called "The Ninth Day. " And she contributed numerous short stories to Harper's, New Republic, McCall's, and other periodicals. Baker occasionally lectured about writing at, among other schools, Stanford University and Pomona College.
She died on June 17, 1968 in Springville, California.
On September 2, 1930, she married the poet and novelist Howard Baker, who had been living there among the expatriates. They had two children.