Nicholson Baker is an American novelist and essayist, known for his inventive and lavishly descriptive prose. His reputation is a complex and even somewhat contradictory one, in that it rests, on the one hand, upon his fixation with seemingly trivial subject matters and, on the other, upon the significant controversy aroused by much of his work. His critical reputation is that of a supreme prose stylist, and many commentators have remarked that, though his books (aside from two non-fiction books and a collection of essays,

The Size of Thoughts

(1997)) tend to be presented as fiction, he is essentially an essayist. The novelist John Banville, for instance, reviewing

Room Temperature

in

The Irish Times

, commended Baker’s luminous prose, comparing it to that of both Nabokov and Joyce, but…

2934 words

Citation: O'Connell, Mark. "Nicholson Baker". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 September 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5216, accessed 19 March 2024.]

5216 Nicholson Baker 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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