14 Facts About Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker was born on January 7,1957 and is an American novelist and essayist.

Nicholson Baker then wrote about the American library system in his 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, for which he received a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Calw Hermann Hesse Prize for the German translation.

Nicholson Baker describes himself as an atheist, although he occasionally visits Quaker meetings.

Nicholson Baker met his wife, Margaret Brentano, in college; they live in Maine and have two grown children.

Nicholson Baker established a name for himself with the novels The Mezzanine and Room Temperature.

Rather than giving a traditional literary analysis, Nicholson Baker begins the book by stating that he will read no more Updike than he already has up to that point.

Nicholson Baker is a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' unnecessary destruction of paper-based media.

Nicholson Baker wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library for sending thousands of books to a landfill, eliminating card catalogs, and destroying old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm.

In 1999, Nicholson Baker established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries.

Nicholson Baker suggests that the pacifists were correct in their views.

In March 2008, Nicholson Baker reviewed John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in the New York Review of Books.

Also in 2009, Nicholson Baker reviewed Ken Auletta's Googled: The End of the World as We Know It in the New York Times.

In 2014, Nicholson Baker spent 28 days as a substitute teacher in some Maine public schools as research for his 2016 book Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids.

Nicholson Baker wrote a cover story for New York Magazine in January 2021 investigating the COVID-19 lab leak theory and expressing his belief in the theory's plausibility.