Dorothy Baker

Dorothy Dodds Baker (1907–1968) was born in Missoula, Montana in 1907 and raised in California. After graduating from UCLA, she traveled in France, where she began a novel and, in 1930, married Howard Baker, a critic, professor, and editor. The couple moved back to California, and Baker completed an MA in French at UCLA, later teaching Latin at a private school. After having a few short stories published, Baker 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, a novel about a white jazz musician, which earned critical praise and eventually became a movie starring Kirk Douglas. She won 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, 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.

Cassandra at the Wedding
Dorothy Baker's fascinating tragicomic novel follows an unpredictable course of events in which Cassandra appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and surprisingly sympathetic.

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