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Summary
Summary
Russell Baker's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography about growing up in America during the Great Depression.
"Magical....He has taken such raw, potentially wrenching material and made of it a story so warm, so likable, and so disarmingly funny...a work of original biographical art."-- The New York Times
In this heartfelt memoir, groundbreaking Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist Russell Baker traces his youth from the backwoods mountains of Virginia to a New Jersey commuter town to the Depression-shadowed landscape of Baltimore.
His is a story of adversity and courage, the poignancy of love and the awkwardness of sex, of family bonds and family tensions. We meet the people who influenced Baker's early life: his strong and loving mother, his bold little sister Doris, the awesome matriarch Ida Rebecca and her twelve sons. Here, too, are schoolyard bullies, great teachers, and the everyday heroes and heroines of the Depression who faced disaster with good cheer as they tried to muddle through.
A modern day classic filled with perfect turns of phrase and traces of quiet wisdom, Growing Up is a coming of age story that is "the stuff of American legend" ( The Washington Post Book World ).
Author Notes
Russell Wayne Baker was born in Loudoun County, Virginia on August 14, 1925. He joined the Navy in 1943 and received pilot training. He never went abroad during World War II and left the service in 1945. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Johns Hopkins University in 1947. After graduating, he became a night police reporter for The Baltimore Sun. By 1950, he had become a rewrite man, taking phoned notes from reporters at the scene and writing stories on deadline. He eventually became The Sun's London correspondent and then it's White House correspondent.
He was hired by The New York Times in 1954 as a Washington correspondent. He covered the State Department, the White House, and the presidential campaigns of 1956 and 1960. In 1962, he became a columnist for The Times and its news service. He wrote the Observer columns until his retirement in 1998. He received the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and two George Polk Awards, for commentary in 1978 and career achievement in 1998. His columns were collected in several books including No Cause for Panic, Baker's Dozen, All Things Considered, and Poor Russell's Almanac.
After his retirement from The Times, he wrote for The New York Review of Books on politics, history, journalism, and other subjects. A collection of 11 of those essays was published in 2002 under the title Looking Back. His other collections included So This Is Depravity and The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams. His other books included An American in Washington, the novel Our Next President: The Incredible Story of What Happened in the 1968 Elections, and The Good Times. Growing Up received a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1983. He was the host of the PBS series Masterpiece Theater from 1993 to 2004. He died from complications of a fall on January 21, 2019 at the age of 93.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
If you're expecting a bouquet of gentle, column-style whimsies from Russell Baker's childhood, forget it. This memoir--shapely, taut, tough--is dotted with Baker-esque laughter, to be sure; but it is more often bleak and quietly fierce, as Baker (framing the 1925-1946 past with 1970s visits to his senile mother) recalls the shadings of Depression poverty . . . and of mother/son love at its most demanding. Mother was a schoolteacher, a take-charge type determined to ""make something"" of her men. Baker's father--a rural Virginia workman--was a disappointment: he died young, a hard-drinking, unreformable diabetic. (""After that I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference."") So, abandoning one of her two daughters (adopted by in-laws), Mother took Russell and sister Doris off to her kin in Newark--where Russell's lack of ""gumption"" was dismayingly apparent in magazine-selling efforts. And always counterpointing Russell's efforts to please (good grades, gifted writing), there's Mother's yen for a home of her own: one suitor, the hapless Oluf, went off looking for a job, writing pathetic letters that form the most heartbreaking chapter here (""I tried to raice an of money so I could go over Home, but so far I diddent . . . so I am asking you to stop writing to me, because I am not interested in anything any more.""). Yet another move to still other relatives brings first the humiliation of being ""on relief,"" then financial salvation--in the form of new stepfather Herb. (""I set out on one of those campaigns of silent resistance of which only adolescents and high-spirited nations under conquerors' occupation are capable."") True, the later sections here are somewhat more conventional: Russell's comic stumbles (primarily sexual) as a G.I. But the windup is right in tune--his marriage to a woman of whom Mother silently disapproves--and, throughout, Baker manages to evoke the Depression world of extended families and pressured expectations with a beguiling, touching blend of irony, warmth, and (most surprisingly) tremendous sadness. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The New York Times columnist gives a characteristically funny yet unexpectedly touching account of his coming-of-age in the Depression. Reflections on the poverty of his childhood mix naturally with rollicking tales of sexual misadventures and military mishaps.
