Listen to legendary
New York Times columnist Russell Baker—he passed away last January 21 at age 93—reminisce with self-deprecating, heartwarming charm and humor about his early years as a police reporter, then as a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning political commentator and book reviewer, and much later as a humor columnist for the newspaper that he fondly called “a childhood’s dream of paradise” (that’s
The New York Times, of course, for which he still occasionally wrote before he died).
IMAGE CREDIT: RICHARD HOWARD / THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION / GETTYIn an interview by
TheAtlantic.com editor Adrienne Lafrance that came out on in the web magazine just two days after he died, Baker summed the ups and downs of this writing career in this wise: “It’s a labor for me to write now... (But) I’m writing because I love to write, of course. It was just a pleasure to write. I’d write things for fun and throw it away. Of course, once you start making money it becomes work and it ceases to be fun, but your writing gets better.”
Of journalistic writing itself, Baker said: “If you haven’t sweated over it, it’s probably not worth it. So it’s always been work. But it’s the kind of work you enjoy having done. The doing of it is hard work. People don’t usually realize what it takes out of you. They just see you sitting there, staring at the wall, and they don’t know that you’re looking for the perfect word to describe a shade of light. I did enjoy writing. Also, I’ve probably said everything I’ve wanted to say.”
Read Adrienne Lafrance’s “When Writing Is Fun, It’s Not Very Good” in the January 23, 2019 issue of TheAtlantic.com now!--------------
Check out this related 2017 reading in the Forum about George Orwell, “A novelist in ill health races with time to finish a masterpiece.”
