Dorothy Dodds Baker (1907–1968)
Author of Cassandra at the Wedding
About the Author
Works by Dorothy Dodds Baker
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1907-04-21
- Date of death
- 1968-06-17
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Whittier College
University of California, Los Angeles (BA|MA) - Occupations
- novelist
language teacher
scriptwriter - Awards and honors
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1942)
Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship
American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award - Relationships
- Baker, Howard (husband)
- Short biography
- Dorothy Dodds was born in Missoula, Montana, and grew up in California. She attended Whittier College before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduation, she traveled in France and then married Howard Baker, a poet, in 1930.
She taught French and Spanish in a private school in Oakland, California but then went back to UCLA to earn her master's degree in French in 1934. In 1938, she published her first novel, Young Man with a Horn, loosely based on the life of Bix Beiderbecke. It was adapted into a successful film in 1950. The novel was a hit and Dorothy Dodds Baker won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Subsequent books included Trio (1943) Our Gifted Son (1948), and Cassandra at the Wedding (1962), which she said was based on her own two daughters.
In 1967, she co-wrote the script of "The Ninth Day" for television's Playhouse 90. She died of cancer at the age of 61. - Cause of death
- cancer
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Missoula, Montana, USA
- Places of residence
- California, USA
- Place of death
- Terra Bella, California, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- California, USA
Members
Discussions
148. Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker in Backlisted Book Club (March 2022)
Reviews
Cassandra At the Wedding by Dorothy Baker was originally published in 1962. It has now been re-published by the New York Review of Books Classics Series and made available to today’s audience. This is an intense story about the relationship between two twin sisters, one of whom is about to get married.
Cassandra has returned to her childhood home to attend her twin’s wedding to a nice, young doctor but she is determined to make her sister call the whole thing off. The book has more than show more one narrator and I really enjoyed Cassandra’s voice. She’s intense, funny and smart with a definite dark side to her personality. Although her selfishness can seem cruel at times, she was quite likeable. When her twin, Judith became the narrator, I was surprised that I also enjoyed her thoughts and words as well as she definitely has the calmer, more sober personality of the two but she knows and recognizes Cassandra’s darker side.
It is obvious that Cassandra is a lesbian although that fact is never definitely declared in the book. The lesbian overtones are quite subtle which I suspect has a lot to do with the times that the book was published. The family seems to acknowledge and accept Cassandra as she is although Cassandra herself seems to be struggling at times. Cassandra at the Wedding is beautifully written, darkly witty, clever and atmospheric. Dorothy Baker strikes me as a very accomplished author who knows how to write comedy. She also trusts her readers to understand and draw their own conclusions and so doesn’t lay everything out on a platter. show less
Cassandra has returned to her childhood home to attend her twin’s wedding to a nice, young doctor but she is determined to make her sister call the whole thing off. The book has more than show more one narrator and I really enjoyed Cassandra’s voice. She’s intense, funny and smart with a definite dark side to her personality. Although her selfishness can seem cruel at times, she was quite likeable. When her twin, Judith became the narrator, I was surprised that I also enjoyed her thoughts and words as well as she definitely has the calmer, more sober personality of the two but she knows and recognizes Cassandra’s darker side.
It is obvious that Cassandra is a lesbian although that fact is never definitely declared in the book. The lesbian overtones are quite subtle which I suspect has a lot to do with the times that the book was published. The family seems to acknowledge and accept Cassandra as she is although Cassandra herself seems to be struggling at times. Cassandra at the Wedding is beautifully written, darkly witty, clever and atmospheric. Dorothy Baker strikes me as a very accomplished author who knows how to write comedy. She also trusts her readers to understand and draw their own conclusions and so doesn’t lay everything out on a platter. show less
Young Man With a Horn sounds like the title of a movie, which of course it is: released in 1950 starring Kirk Douglas, Lauran Bacall, and Doris Day. Perhaps less famous is the novel on which it was based written by Dorothy Baker and published in 1938. The story is a fictional biography of a young jazz musician (Rick Martin) who burnt out at the relatively young age of 28 mainly through an addiction to alcohol. I have not seen the film but apparently in the film version, the women in his life show more were also instrumental in his downfall, but this motif is underplayed in the book. Women were almost incidental in Rick's life, his passion was playing music, which would probably not have been such good subject for the box office receipts of this film.
A simple story then, but Dorothy Baker does something different; she is intent on getting across to her readers Rick Martins passion for music. She describes the intensity of his playing and his need to push himself further in musical terms, that amateur musicians and others who have similar passions will understand. Rick Martin was a poor white boy from Los Angeles who discovered he had an ear for tunes and set about teaching himself to play hymns on an old piano he found in the basement of a church. The church congregation were black folks and when they discovered Rick one night they frightened him half to death. Rick could be described as a "loner" only meeting people through music and when he does make a friend it is with Smoke a black youth who plays drums. It is Smoke who gets Rick interested in jazz as Rick is already changing around the hymn tunes that he has learned and the two young men hook up with Jeff Williams and his hot band of black musicians. Rick finds himself in a world of young black people in 1920's America, but to Rick and the book as a whole this is incidental, because it is the music that drives his world.
Later Rick gets a job as a musician in an all white band as he would be expected to do, but although he enjoyed the playing he is continually striving to be the best and finds the only way of really stretching himself is to play with the black musicians. He becomes relatively well off and very much respected: a musician's musician, he has switched from piano to trumpet and is the star in whichever group he performs. He cannot however push his head through the glass ceiling that he encounters, his attempts to get a band featuring black musicians to record does not attract the financial backing that he needs. He marries a society white girl who is attracted by his talent, but cannot live her life centred around Rick's music and Rick becomes frustrated and uses alcohol to fuel his talent........
The first sentence of the book says:
"In the first place he shouldn't have got himself mixed up with negroes"
This proves to be ambiguous, because without being "mixed up" in the world of black musicians Rick probably would not have discovered his passion, his purpose in life. The musical world that these black people inhabit is the backbone of this novel and Baker makes a wonderful job of describing the feeling of joy that they find in the playing of jazz music. Here is Jeff Williams leader and piano player putting the band through their paces:
"Jeff led them to it with four bars in the key and then the horns came in together held lightly by a slim melody by three separate leashes. Then Jeff led the rhythm to the drums, and the piano became the fourth voice, and from then on harmony prevailed in a strange coherence, each man improvising wildly on his own and the four of them managing to fit it together and tightly. Feeling ran high, and happy inspiration followed happy inspiration to produce counterpoint that you'd swear somebody had sat down and worked out note by note on nice clean manuscript paper. But nobody had: it came into the heads of four men and out again by way of three horns and one piano"
Dorothy Baker's prose takes inspiration from the hard-bitten crime novels such as those by Raymond Chandler that were flooding the market in the 1930's. Her novel has run its course in just over 120 pages and the feeling is that hardly a word has been wasted. Quite simply this is one of the best novels that pins down a musical milieu that I have read and so 5 stars. show less
A simple story then, but Dorothy Baker does something different; she is intent on getting across to her readers Rick Martins passion for music. She describes the intensity of his playing and his need to push himself further in musical terms, that amateur musicians and others who have similar passions will understand. Rick Martin was a poor white boy from Los Angeles who discovered he had an ear for tunes and set about teaching himself to play hymns on an old piano he found in the basement of a church. The church congregation were black folks and when they discovered Rick one night they frightened him half to death. Rick could be described as a "loner" only meeting people through music and when he does make a friend it is with Smoke a black youth who plays drums. It is Smoke who gets Rick interested in jazz as Rick is already changing around the hymn tunes that he has learned and the two young men hook up with Jeff Williams and his hot band of black musicians. Rick finds himself in a world of young black people in 1920's America, but to Rick and the book as a whole this is incidental, because it is the music that drives his world.
Later Rick gets a job as a musician in an all white band as he would be expected to do, but although he enjoyed the playing he is continually striving to be the best and finds the only way of really stretching himself is to play with the black musicians. He becomes relatively well off and very much respected: a musician's musician, he has switched from piano to trumpet and is the star in whichever group he performs. He cannot however push his head through the glass ceiling that he encounters, his attempts to get a band featuring black musicians to record does not attract the financial backing that he needs. He marries a society white girl who is attracted by his talent, but cannot live her life centred around Rick's music and Rick becomes frustrated and uses alcohol to fuel his talent........
The first sentence of the book says:
"In the first place he shouldn't have got himself mixed up with negroes"
This proves to be ambiguous, because without being "mixed up" in the world of black musicians Rick probably would not have discovered his passion, his purpose in life. The musical world that these black people inhabit is the backbone of this novel and Baker makes a wonderful job of describing the feeling of joy that they find in the playing of jazz music. Here is Jeff Williams leader and piano player putting the band through their paces:
"Jeff led them to it with four bars in the key and then the horns came in together held lightly by a slim melody by three separate leashes. Then Jeff led the rhythm to the drums, and the piano became the fourth voice, and from then on harmony prevailed in a strange coherence, each man improvising wildly on his own and the four of them managing to fit it together and tightly. Feeling ran high, and happy inspiration followed happy inspiration to produce counterpoint that you'd swear somebody had sat down and worked out note by note on nice clean manuscript paper. But nobody had: it came into the heads of four men and out again by way of three horns and one piano"
Dorothy Baker's prose takes inspiration from the hard-bitten crime novels such as those by Raymond Chandler that were flooding the market in the 1930's. Her novel has run its course in just over 120 pages and the feeling is that hardly a word has been wasted. Quite simply this is one of the best novels that pins down a musical milieu that I have read and so 5 stars. show less
The story of two identical twins Cassandra and Judith brought up in a wealthy professional family who face separation when the younger twin (Judith: a matter of minutes) plans to get married. The time scale of the novel is a momentous three days in the lives of the two girls as they try and work through the difficulties of not being together or as Cassandra says no longer being as one. The title of the book has led to a soundbite on the front cover describing it as "A dark comedy about show more marriage' which is wrong on both counts; it is not a comedy and it's not about marriage.
The novel was published in 1962 and was the last of the four novels Dorothy Baker wrote. I recently read her first novel [Young Man with a Horn] and was so impressed by Baker's handling of dialogue that I wanted to read this novel which is said to be her best. Dorothy Baker's husband claimed that the novel was based on their own two daughters and certainly the dialogue between the two crackles with an intensity that feels like it could have actually taken place. Like her first novel there is hardly a word out of place.
The first part of the novel is from the POV of Cassandra. She is travelling from Berkley California to her parents ranch some 5 hours away. She wants to see her sister who has returned home to prepare for her wedding. We learn that the sisters had set up house together in Berkley but nine months ago Judith had left and had now met a man she wants to marry. Cassandra had only been alone for three weeks before seeking help from psychiatry. Now on her journey home the anxiety that she feels is expressed by her first telephone call to her parents home where it is revealed she is travelling one day earlier than planned to see her sister before the wedding. She finally gets to speak to Judith and her knees "buckle with recognition" when she hears her sisters voice. For the majority of the novel we hear Cassandra's side of the story, her view of the close relationship with her sister and their relationship with their father and Granny who still lives at home. A smaller chunk of the novel is from Judith's point of view before we are back with Cassie.
Baker is able to pinpoint in some detail the sisters' state of mind through their actions and conversations. Because much of the novel is from Cassie's POV she is seen as a sort of victim, the one who will lose most from Judith's marriage. The family unit is a little reclusive living out on the ranch and their father is a professor who has sought solace in brandy after the early death of his wife. The two sisters like him are very intelligent, but this does not help them solve their emotional issues, nobody behaves badly, but extricating themselves from the emotional trauma of their separation proves to be impossible without hurting the more vulnerable Cassie.
The micro world of this novel is not going to shed any light on the human condition, but it does focus extremely well on a vary small incident within it. From the first few pages the quality of the writing hooked me into Cassie and the families' issues, but as the story unfolded I thought the novel lost a little of its intensity. However a very good read and so 4 stars. show less
The novel was published in 1962 and was the last of the four novels Dorothy Baker wrote. I recently read her first novel [Young Man with a Horn] and was so impressed by Baker's handling of dialogue that I wanted to read this novel which is said to be her best. Dorothy Baker's husband claimed that the novel was based on their own two daughters and certainly the dialogue between the two crackles with an intensity that feels like it could have actually taken place. Like her first novel there is hardly a word out of place.
The first part of the novel is from the POV of Cassandra. She is travelling from Berkley California to her parents ranch some 5 hours away. She wants to see her sister who has returned home to prepare for her wedding. We learn that the sisters had set up house together in Berkley but nine months ago Judith had left and had now met a man she wants to marry. Cassandra had only been alone for three weeks before seeking help from psychiatry. Now on her journey home the anxiety that she feels is expressed by her first telephone call to her parents home where it is revealed she is travelling one day earlier than planned to see her sister before the wedding. She finally gets to speak to Judith and her knees "buckle with recognition" when she hears her sisters voice. For the majority of the novel we hear Cassandra's side of the story, her view of the close relationship with her sister and their relationship with their father and Granny who still lives at home. A smaller chunk of the novel is from Judith's point of view before we are back with Cassie.
Baker is able to pinpoint in some detail the sisters' state of mind through their actions and conversations. Because much of the novel is from Cassie's POV she is seen as a sort of victim, the one who will lose most from Judith's marriage. The family unit is a little reclusive living out on the ranch and their father is a professor who has sought solace in brandy after the early death of his wife. The two sisters like him are very intelligent, but this does not help them solve their emotional issues, nobody behaves badly, but extricating themselves from the emotional trauma of their separation proves to be impossible without hurting the more vulnerable Cassie.
The micro world of this novel is not going to shed any light on the human condition, but it does focus extremely well on a vary small incident within it. From the first few pages the quality of the writing hooked me into Cassie and the families' issues, but as the story unfolded I thought the novel lost a little of its intensity. However a very good read and so 4 stars. show less
I came across the idea of reading this book because it was all over bookish Twitter last month and then I saw that the hosts of the Backlisted podcast had selected it as their featured book a couple of weeks ago. And it is a gem.
When the novel opens, eponymous Cassandra is on her way home from Berkeley where she is working on her thesis, to her father's ranch in Northern California for her twin sister Judith's wedding. It's the early 1960s and these twins have grown up thinking they only show more need each other and Cassandra still feels that way. But she now knows that Judith probably doesn't otherwise why would she be getting married and planning to live across the country in NY?They used to share an apartment at Berkeley but earlier that year she had moved to NY. And Cassandra is miffed. But she has other problems that are slowly revealed over the short novel's pages but it pretty much all boils down to the relationship between these two sisters.
The writing is stunning. The cast of characters, although quite short, is brilliant: drunken, arrogant father; meek, aim to please grandmother; future perfect husband Jake and the twins, Judith, a brilliant pianist and Cassandra, a brilliant writer if she can allow herself to be because lurking in the background throughout the novel is Jane, the twin's mother for whom they are still grieving after her death a few years prior.
I loved it. But listening to the Backlisted podcast after I read the book added another whole dimension to the appreciation of this book. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing a lot of that in the future. show less
When the novel opens, eponymous Cassandra is on her way home from Berkeley where she is working on her thesis, to her father's ranch in Northern California for her twin sister Judith's wedding. It's the early 1960s and these twins have grown up thinking they only show more need each other and Cassandra still feels that way. But she now knows that Judith probably doesn't otherwise why would she be getting married and planning to live across the country in NY?They used to share an apartment at Berkeley but earlier that year she had moved to NY. And Cassandra is miffed. But she has other problems that are slowly revealed over the short novel's pages but it pretty much all boils down to the relationship between these two sisters.
The writing is stunning. The cast of characters, although quite short, is brilliant: drunken, arrogant father; meek, aim to please grandmother; future perfect husband Jake and the twins, Judith, a brilliant pianist and Cassandra, a brilliant writer if she can allow herself to be because lurking in the background throughout the novel is Jane, the twin's mother for whom they are still grieving after her death a few years prior.
I loved it. But listening to the Backlisted podcast after I read the book added another whole dimension to the appreciation of this book. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing a lot of that in the future. show less
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