Wallace E. Baker

Very little about his life can be confirmed with confidence. What is clear from contemporary publication records is that Wallace E. Baker died in 1913 and became known through Diary of a Suicide, which appeared as the October 1913 issue of The Glebe, the modernist little magazine edited by Alfred Kreymborg and associated with a small but influential literary circle in New York.

The published foreword says Baker mailed his diary to B. Russell Herts of The International on September 27, 1913, writing that he was about to take his own life and hoping the record might help others. According to that same foreword, his body was found off Manhattan Beach on September 28, identified on October 2, and buried in Brooklyn on October 3.

Because so little else is securely documented, he is remembered less through biography than through the work itself. That diary remains his only widely known book, and its plain, searching account of despair, ambition, self-scrutiny, and isolation has given Baker a small but lasting place in literary history.