Kevin Baker (author)

For the hockey player, see Kevin Baker (hockey)

Kevin Baker (born 1958) 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, published by HarperCollins, which consists of the following historical novels: Dreamland (1998); the bestselling Paradise Alley (2002); and Strivers Row (2006). The middle volume of the trilogy won the 2003 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction and the American Book Award.

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

In 2014, Baker's historical novel The Big Crowd was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Scott Turow for The New York Times Book Review wrote: "Best of all, the novel delivers on what the title promises....I've read few other novels that portray, in such a nuanced way, the temptations of power, the complex division of control in a great metropolis and the perils of political deal-making."

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 The New York Times Book Review. Baker appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and The Colbert Report in 2009, to discuss the Obama presidency.

Notes

• Kevin Baker Books