Russell Wayne Baker (1925–2019) was an American journalist, humorist, and television host. He was one of the most eminent practitioners of the personal-political essay in the English language.
Born in Loudoun County, Virginia, Baker became a journalistic writer after graduating from Johns Hopkins in 1947. In 1962, he launched a 36-year run as a witty editorial columnist for The New York Times. Writing more than 5,000 whimsical, irreverent “Observer” columns, Baker won a 1979 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary.
Baker’s witty and observant columns on government and all aspects of American life have been gathered in numerous books including American in Washington (1961,) No Cause for Panic (1964,) All Things Considered (1965,) Our Next President (1968,) and Poor Russell’s Almanac (1972.)
Growing Up (1982,) Baker’s autobiography of his youthful years during the Depression-era, was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize (for biography.) The Good Times (1989,) also autobiographical, describes a more mature period. Looking Back: Heroes, Rascals, and Other Icons of the American Imagination (2002) collects eleven essays that originally appeared in The New York Review of Books.
Baker hosted the PBS television program Masterpiece Theater 1993–2004.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Russell Baker
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Excuses
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Communication
It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Economics, Money, Economy
In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to being in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one’s beloved
—Russell Baker
Topics: Fashion
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.
—Russell Baker
Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in, the living’s fine,” and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Carpe-diem, Life and Living
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Seasons, Summer
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can’t even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
—Russell Baker
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out on the pleasure.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Pleasure
In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Tradition
Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Happiness
One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general un-worthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Hypocrisy
Reporters thrive on the world’s misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
—Russell Baker
Topics: Media
Live by publicity, you’ll probably die by publicity.
—Russell Baker
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Henry Adams American Historian
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
David McCullough American Historian
Annie Dillard American Writer
Joan Didion American Essayist, Novelist, Memoirist
B. B. King American Blues Musician
Robert Altman American Film Director
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
William Dean Howells American Writer, Critic
Harvey Williams Cushing American Neurosurgeon, Biographer