Wallace E. Baker

Published in October 1913 as the second issue of The Glebe, Diary of a Suicide is the work most clearly connected with Wallace E. Baker. Contemporary notes printed with the text say he sent the manuscript to B. Russell Herts shortly before his death, and that his body was identified in New York in early October 1913.

Very little reliable biographical information about Baker appears to survive beyond the circumstances surrounding that publication. What can be confirmed is that his diary was presented by The Glebe as the testimony of a young man in crisis, and the piece later remained in circulation through archival and public-domain editions.

Because so few verified details are available, Baker is remembered less through a conventional life story than through the direct, urgent voice of his writing. That rarity gives his work an unusual power: it reads not like a polished literary persona, but like a document from a real life at its breaking point.