R.I.P.: Russell Baker, Pulitzer Prize Winning Writer

Russell Baker (August 14, 1925 – January 21, 2019)

Russell Baker, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose whimsical, irreverent “Observer” column appeared in The New York Times and hundreds of other newspapers for 36 years and turned a backwoods-born Virginian into one of America’s most celebrated writers, died on Monday at his home in Leesburg, Va.

He was 93, according to The NYTimes.

The cause was complications from a fall, according to his son Allen Baker.

Baker, along with the syndicated columnist Art Buchwald (who died in 2007), was one of the best-known newspaper humorists of his time, and The Washington Post ranked his best-selling autobiography, “Growing Up,” with the most enduring recollections of American boyhood — those of James Thurber, H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain.

In a career begun in a rakish fedora and the smoky press rooms of the 1940s, Baker was a police reporter, a rewrite man and a London correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, and after 1954 a Washington correspondent for The Times, rising swiftly with a clattering typewriter and a deft writer’s touch to cover the White House, Congress and the presidential campaigns of 1956 and 1960.

Then, starting in 1962, he became a columnist for The Times and its news service, eventually composing nearly 5,000 “Observer” commentaries — 3.7 million insightful words on the news of the day — often laced with invented characters and dialogue, on an array of subjects including dreaded Christmas fruitcake and women’s shoulder pads. The columns, which generated a devoted following, critical acclaim and the 1979 Pulitzer for distinguished commentary, ended with his retirement in 1998.