Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker was born in New York City in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, where he played bassoon in high school and spent a year at the Eastman School of Music before transferring to Haverford College. His first novel, The Mezzanine, was about a man riding an escalator.  His second novel, Room Temperature, was about a man feeding a bottle to his baby.  In his many other works of fiction and nonfiction, he has written about John Updike, about getting up early in the morning, about the inner life of a nine-year-old girl, about the beginnings of the Second World War, and about sex.   His book Double Fold, about libraries shedding their paper holdings, won a National Book Critics Circle Award.  His  poet protagonist Paul Chowder, who first appeared in The Anthologist , is reintroduced in Traveling Sprinkler, his tenth novel, and fifteenth book overall.  He lives in Maine with his family.