Herschel C. Baker established his reputation as an intellectual historian, editor, biographer, and teacher. His writings range over the spectrum of history and literature from pre-Socratic Greece to nineteenth-century England; and, as was his teaching, they are informed by urbane wit and good humor. A 13 November 1990 memorial minute of the Harvard faculty refers to Baker as a "versatile humanist and Renaissance scholar in the Harvard tradition of George Lyman Kittredge and Hyder E. Rollins." To Rollins he dedicated his first work of intellectual history, The Dignity of Man: Studies in the Persistence of an Idea (1947), and edited with him The Renaissance in England: Non-Dramatic Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century (1954).

Born in Cleburne, Texas, on 8 November 1914 to Tyler Alexander Baker and Mae Waples Deffenbach Baker, Herschel Clay Baker attended Southern Methodist University, where he wrote the music for several amateur operas. He graduated in 1935 with both Mus...