Nicholson Baker
| Nicholson Baker | |
|---|---|
Baker in 2013
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| Born |
January 7, 1957 New York City |
| Education | Eastman School of Music |
| Alma mater | Haverford College |
| Genre | Novels, non-fiction, essays |
Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Prize (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and edited at . A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup to World War II.
Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 in New York City and spent much of his youth in the Rochester, New York area. He studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music and received a B.A. in English from Haverford College.
Baker is a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' unnecessary destruction of paper-based media. He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library for sending thousands of books to a landfill, eliminating card catalogs, and destroying old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm. In 1997, Baker received the San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of these efforts.
In 1999, Baker established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries. In 2001 he published Double Fold, in which he accuses certain librarians of lying about the decay of materials and being obsessed with technological fads, at the expense of both the public and historical preservation.
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