In the course of a long career Carlos Baker produced a considerable body of scholarship on the Romantic poets and on a variety of American authors, and wrote novels and poetry: but he is most widely remembered as the official biographer of Ernest Hemingway. Baker's major works on Hemingway are his 1952 study of Hemingway's fiction, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist; his 1969 biography, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story; and his 1981 volume of Hemingway's correspondence, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. In addition, Baker reviewed some of Hemingway's books and edited and contributed to several collections of essays on Hemingway. During and after his work on the Hemingway biography he wrote several pieces on the importance and the practice of the biographer's art.

Carlos Heard Baker was born on 5 May 1909 in Biddeford, Maine, to Arthur E. and Edna Heard Baker. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College (Phi Beta Kappa...