Carlos Baker

Who was Carlos Baker?

Carlos Baker was an American writer, biographer and former Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. He earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton respectively. Baker's published works included several novels and books of poetry and various literary criticisms and essays.

In 1969 he published the well-regarded scholarly biography of Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. However, in "Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn," she criticizes Baker's assertions concerning her affair and marriage to Hemingway, and indicates that Baker was frequently wrong about those matters she experienced personally, and which Baker wrote about. Ernest Hemingway never met Baker, according to Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, who also asserts in her 1976 book "How It Was" that Hemingway deliberately chose someone who never knew him. Mary does not offer a specific reason for this choice, but Baker had published "Hemingway: The Writer as Artist" in 1952, which favorably treated Hemingway's work to that date.

Baker's other major works included a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley.