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Nicholson Baker Awarded KAP Prize

On May 19, 2004, Nicholson Baker received the Katherine Anne Porter Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in a ceremony held in New York City. Presented by 2004 National Book Award winner Shirley Hazzard, the biannual monetary award recognizes a fiction writer in mid-career. In addition to Hazzard, the jury included Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Romulus Linney, Jane Smiley, and Edmund White.

Mr. Baker was born in New York City in 1957. He originally pursued an education in music and attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. After studying composition for two years, Baker enrolled at Haverford College where he completed an English degree in 1980. He went on to hold jobs as a Wall Street oil analyst and stockbroker, before moving to Berkeley, California. There, he attended a two-week seminar run by Donald Barthelme, whom Baker has cited as a strong influence on his work. In the late 1980s, Baker was published in Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker, and by 1987 he had devoted himself full time to writing.

The award citation calls Baker “the quintessential archivist” for his pursuit of “the pleasures of the small and the ephemeral . . . of moments, of fugitive thoughts, of what passes unnoticed.” Speaking of his work, Baker has said “I want the books to be about the things that you don’t notice when you’re noticing them.” His first two novels carry out this mission in exacting, exquisite detail. The first, The Mezzanine (1988), concerns itself with the thoughts and observation of the protagonist while he runs errands on his lunch break. Room Temperature (1990), reduces its time span to twenty minutes, as the narrator ruminates on the objects and impressions of his domestic environment. Baker next shifted his focus to erotic impulses with his next two novels. Vox (1992) consists of a phone conversation between its two protagonists, while The Fermata (1994) is the story of a man who can stop time and acts out his sexual peccadilloes while others are frozen in space. With The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998) and A Box of Matches (2003), Baker returned to an examination of the everyday, the former through the eyes of a nine-year old American girl attending school in England and the latter in the thoughts of a man using up the matches in a box by lighting a fire on successive mornings.

Along with his fiction, Baker’s essays and non-fiction include U and I: A True Story (1991) about the influence of John Updike on his work; the collection The Shape of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1996); and Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), a controversial argument against the destruction of libraries’ holdings of newspapers and other paper-based materials. In 2001, Double Fold was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction. Baker has again provoked controversy with his latest book, Checkpoint, which consists of a conversation between a man who is preparing to assassinate President Bush and his friend who tries to dissuade him. Checkpoint was published in August 2004 by Knopf; Baker’s other fiction and non-fiction remains in print in Vintage Books paperback editions.

An outgrowth of Double Fold was Baker’s founding of the American Newspaper Repository in 1999 in order to save a collection of original newspapers that would otherwise have been destroyed or dispersed. By April 2004, the repository was relocated to the Library Services Center at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, to be overseen by the Rare Books and Special Collections division. If the terms of the gift agreement between the repository and the university are met, the collection becomes a gift to Duke University in 2005.

Baker currently lives in Maine, with his wife and their two children. He is the second recipient of the Katherine Anne Porter Award; the first was Lynn Freed who received the prize in 2002. The prize was established by the Literary Trust of Katherine Anne Porter.