Big Crowd (Baker) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—August 1958
• Where—Englewood, New Jersey, USA
• Raised—Rockport, Massachusetts
• Education—B.A., Columbia University
• Awards—James Fenimore Cooper Prize; American
   Book Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Kevin Baker is an American novelist and journalist. He was born in Englewood, New Jersey and grew up in New Jersey and Rockport, Massachusetts.

As a youth he worked on the Gloucester Daily Times, covering school-boy sports, as well as local town meetings and other civic affairs. He graduated from Columbia University, where he majored in political science, in 1980.

Baker is the author of the City of Fire trilogy, which consists of the following historical novels: Dreamland (1999); the bestselling Paradise Alley (2002); and Strivers Row (2006). The middle volume of the trilogy was the winner of the 2003 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction and the American Book Award.

He has also written a contemporary baseball novel, called Sometimes You See it Coming (1993), and a graphic novel called Luna Park (2009). Baker was chief historical researcher on Harold Evans’s illustrated history of the United States, The American Century (1999). He is also the author of The Story of Us, the companion book to the  History Channel 2010 series, and wrote the new final chapter for the reissue of Baseball, the companion book to  Ken Burns' 1994 10-part series, Baseball,  which has aired on public television.

Baker resides in New York, where he is a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine. He was formerly a columnist for "In the News" in American Heritage magazine, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and New York Times Book Review. Baker appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and The Colbert Report in the summer of 2009, to discuss the Barack Obama Presidency. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/11/2014.)