Dorothy Baker

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Dorothy Baker (birth name: Dorothy Dodds * 21st April 1907 in Missoula , Montana ; † 17th June 1968 in Terra Bella , California ) was an American novel writer , in particular by its 1938 published debut novel Young Man With A Horn on the life of the jazz cornet player Bix Beiderbecke became known. Together with her husband Howard Baker , she and Trio wrote a play about the breakup of a lesbian couple in 1944 .

Life

Dorothy Dodds, daughter of Raymond Dodds and his wife Alice Grady Dodds, began after attending Whittier College an undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which she finished in 1929 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA). A subsequent postgraduate degree in engineering at Occidental College she completed in 1930 with a Bachelor of Engineering. On September 2, 1930, she married the writer Howard Baker and then worked for some time as a teacher of French and Spanish at a high school in Oakland . In 1933 she took up another postgraduate course in French at the University of California, Berkeley , which she finished in 1934 with a Master of Arts (MA).

Inspired by the life of the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke , Dorothy Baker wrote her debut novel Young Man With A Horn in 1938 , which was filmed in 1950 by Michael Curtiz under the title The Man of Her Dreams with Kirk Douglas , Lauren Bacall and Doris Day . For her novel, she received a grant from the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishing house . In 1942 she also received a Guggenheim scholarship and in 1944 wrote Trio with her husband , a play about the separation of a lesbian couple . However, this stage work was not a great success, so she concentrated again on writing novels.

Her 1962 novel Cassandra at the Wedding was about identical twins who were particularly close and were based on the lives of the two daughters of the Baker couple, Ellen and Joan Baker. Most recently she wrote the script for The Ninth Day for an episode of the television series Playhouse 90 , which is about a young man who lives in a group after the Third World War and is forced by the elderly to marry the only young woman in the group when he was about to leave the group. After her death from complications from cancer on June 17, 1968, Dorothy Baker was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery in Porterville .

Publications

  • Young man with a horn , 1938
  • Our gifted son , 1948
  • Trio , 1943
  • Cassandra at the wedding , 1962
  • The ninth day , 1967
in German language
  • The jazz trumpeter , Humboldt Verlag, Vienna 1949
  • Fallen Trumpet , Sanssouci Verlag, Zurich 1961
  • Cassandra at the wedding , Verlag Krüger, Hamburg 1965
  • Two sisters , dtv, Munich 2015
  • I may be wrong, but I think you're fabulous , dtv, Munich 2017

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Baker, Dorothy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dodds, Dorothy (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Missoula , Montana
DATE OF DEATH 17th June 1968
Place of death Terra Bella , California