Carlos Baker; Hemingway’s Biographer

PRINCETON, N.J. — Carlos Heard Baker, who wrote the authorized biography of Ernest Hemingway in 1969 and published a sampling of the more than 2,000 letters the Nobel laureate wrote before his suicide in 1961, has died at 77, Princeton University announced Monday.

The retired Princeton professor died at his home Saturday night after a brief illness, the university said.

In 1952, Baker published “Hemingway: The Writer as Artist,” the first full-length study of Hemingway’s work. He wrote the authorized “Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story” which Robert Kirsch, the late Los Angeles Times book critic, called “a great biography” which “gives satisfying detail. . . . “

Literature Scholar

Baker, a modern English and American literature scholar, twice headed the Princeton English department and was named the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature before he retired.

His other books included “Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision” and “The Echoing Green: Romanticism, Modernism and the Phenomena of Transference in Poetry.”

In 1961, he published a widely acclaimed collection of more than 600 of the letters Hemingway had written to and about such fellow celebrities as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.

Baker received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1940, three years after he began teaching in the university’s English department. He retired in 1977.