NICHOLSON BAKER

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. His early novels such as The
Mezzanine and Room Temperature were distinguished by their minute inspection of his characters' and
narrators' stream of consciousness. Out of a total of ten novels, three are erotica: Vox, The
Fermata and House of Holes.
Nicholson Baker is an American novelist, essayist, and historical preservationist who has been active from
the 1980s up to the present day. While his work spans several genres, he is best known for his novels,
which display a signature style involving first-person narrators relaying intensely detailed observations
within a constrained time frame. Baker's novels usually contain little in the way of traditional plot, involving
few major conflicts or antagonists. Instead, the intrigue of his writing comes from the ways in which he
follows the twists and turns of his protagonists’ thoughts as they reflect on and describe everyday objects in
ludicrously unsparing detail. For example, The Mezzanine , Baker's debut novel, consists entirely of the
thoughts of Howie, a young office worker, as he takes a midday lunch break. The novel takes place within a
single hour and contains no major characters other than Howie. Like most of Baker's novels, it contains, in
lieu of traditional plot, pages-long descriptions of everyday minutiae, all relayed from a narrator's delightfully
obsessive point of view. This unique narrative style reflects Baker's desire, as stated in the essay “Changes
Mind,” to follow “each sequential change of mind in its true, knotted, clotted, viny multifariousness, with all
of the colorful streamers of intelligence still taped on and flapping in the wind.

Baker created the American Newspaper Repository in 1999. He has also written about and edited
His first and most famous novel about the 1980s office life, The Mezzanine, was translated into
more than a dozen languages. Baker’s work has brought him numerous national prizes and
fellowships, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award, New York Times Notable Books of the
Year, and Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.Maine’s Penobscot River and has frequented the
Colby College Museum of Art over the years. “I’m excited to be a part of what’s going on at Colby.
I’ve always had a lot of fond feelings for the College.” In the late ’90s, Baker and Brentano
cofounded the American Newspaper Repository, saving a large collection of newspaper volumes,
including Joseph Pulitzer’s the New York World and rare runs of newspapers such as the Chicago
Tribune and the New York Times. As the Jennifer Jahrling Forese Creative Writing Fellow, Baker
will design and teach a semester-long creative writing course, hold office hours, and generally be
available to students. “The fun thing about teaching is that students take classes in unexpected
directions,” said Baker, whose course in the spring semester will “cruise through the pages of The
New Yorker.” Looking at American and world history through this iconic magazine, the students
will read works of great prose writers, learn from their techniques, and practice those themselves
under Baker’s guidance and mentorship. Michael Burke, professor of English and director of the
Creative Writing Program, said that up-close and sustained interaction with an accomplished writer
is a valuable addition to the Program. “There are other writer-in-residence programs, but not many
at schools our size, and even fewer as generous as this one,” Burke said. “This is an exciting
experience we can provide our students, adding to what is already one of the top small-college
creative writing programs.” It’s also adding another really unique and valuable teacher such as
Baker, he stressed. The new program adds to a robust creative writing presence on campus,
including the Stahl Writer-in-Residence, which brings writers to Colby for week-long stays working
with students and giving talks, and a visiting writers series that brings a succession of novelists,
poets, and nonfiction writers to campus every year.An English major at Mount Holyoke College who
continues to write fiction and for her own journal, she said she has met writers at events and has
always been fascinated by their discussion of the writing process and craft. The program will allow
for that to happen often for Colby students. “Having these accomplished writers in the classroom,
and integrated into the campus environment, is an invaluable experience for developing writers and
the Colby community as a whole,” Jahrling Forese said. “I’m excited about the first writer-in-
residence, Nicholson Baker, and the format of his semester at Colby. It’s exactly how I envisioned
it.
KURT VONNEGUT
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was an American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career
spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five
nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.
Kurt Vonnegut emerged as a novelist and essayist in the 1960s and penned the classic books Cat's
Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions before 1980. He is known for his satirical literary
style, as well as the science-fiction elements in much of his work. Vonnegut is considered one of the most
influential American novelists of the twentieth century. He blended literature with science fiction and humor,
and the absurd with pointed social commentary. Vonnegut created his own unique world in each of his
novels and filled them with unusual characters, such as the alien race known as the Tralfamadorians
in Slaughterhouse-Five.

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and
enlisted in the US Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute
of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to
Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was
interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the
slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had
three children. He adopted his nephews after his sister died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train
accident. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago, while he worked as a night reporter for
the City News Bureau.

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively but
was not commercially successful at the time. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published
several novels that were well regarded, two of which (The Sirens of Titan [1959] and Cat's
Cradle [1963]) were nominated for the Hugo Award for best SF or fantasy novel of the year. He
published a short-story collection titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. His breakthrough
was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The book's
anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War, and its reviews
were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York
Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures, and
commencement addresses around the country, and received many awards and honors.

Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essay and short-story collections,
such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he
was hailed as one of the most important contemporary writers and a dark humor commentator on
American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works,
titled Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories,
a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction, including five previously unpublished stories. Complete
Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan
Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.