Dorothy Baker (1907-1968) was born in Montana and grew up in California. Her first novel, Young Man with a Horn (1938), based on the life of the white jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, won a Houghton Mifflin Literature Fellowship and was made into a 1950 film starring Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, and Kirk Douglas. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942, Baker wrote three other novels: Trio (1943), Our Gifted Son (1948) and Cassandra at the Wedding (1962).