Dorothy Baker

Dorothy Baker (April 21, 1907 – June 17, 1968) was an American novelist who wrote the lesbian pulp novel Trio, along with widely-successful romance novels. She married poet Howard Baker and together they composed fiction and plays.

Early life and education Baker was born Dorothy Alice Dodds on April 21, 1907, in Missoula, Montana to Raymond Branson Dodds and Alice Sowers Grady. Dorothy was raised in California, where her father worked in the oil business. As a child, she played the violin, but became crippled with polio and resigned to write about music instead of playing it.

She studied at UCLA, transferred to Whittier College, then back to the UCLA, from where she graduated in 1929 with a B.A. in French. Upon graduation, she traveled to France with her future husband, the poet Howard Baker. The two married on August 22, 1930. The couple moved back to California where Dorothy earned a B.E. degree at Occidental College and completed a M.A. in French from UCLA, which she received in 1933.

After finishing her Master's, Baker taught at a small preparatory school until the mid-30s when she left to pursue a writing career. but Baker remained married to her husband, and it seems these inclinations were mostly set aside, except for in her fiction. Each romantic relationship in Baker's novels are doomed to be impossible. Three of her novels include lesbian-leaning characters, although in each case their sexuality is slightly warped: "too insistently smart, too anxiously empty, a little malicious."

Her next book Trio was published in 1943. The story was a big departure from her previous work: "[Trio] deals with the rivalry between a sophisticated female French professor and an unsuspecting young man for the attention of a female graduate student." With its themes of lesbianism, the subject of the novel drew critical response. In interviews, Baker would deny the references to lesbianism. The book was not considered immoral by the Commonwealth Club of California, and the club also gave Trio the General Literature Gold Medal in 1943. This novel won the admiration of Alfred Kazin and Carson McCullers.

Baker named Ernest Hemingway as her role model.