Dorothy Baker (1) (1907–1968)

Dorothy Dodds was born in Montana and raised in California. After graduating from UCLA in 1929, she traveled in France, where she began writing fiction. In 1930, she married the poet Howard Baker, and the couple moved back to California. Dorothy Baker taught French and Spanish at a private school in Oakland and then returned to UCLA to earn a master's degree. After publishing a few short stories, she began to write full time. In 1938, she published the novel Young Man with a Horn, based on the life of musician Bix Beiderbecke, which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 and the next year published Trio, a novel about a lesbian relationship that proved too scandalous for its time. She and her husband adapted the novel as a Broadway play in 1944, but it was quickly shut down due to protests. Her final novel was Cassandra at the Wedding, which her husband said was based on her own family. Dorothy Baker died of cancer at age 61.