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Cassandra At The Wedding![]() Stock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionCassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Author descriptionDorothy Dodds Baker (1907-1968) was born in Missoula, Montana in 1907 and raised in California. After graduating fromUCLA, she traveled in France, where she began a novel and, in 1930, married Howard Baker, a critic, professor, and editor. The couple moved back to California, and Baker completed an MA in French at UCLA, later teaching Latin at a private school. After having a few short stories published, Baker turned to writing full-time, despite, she would later claim, being "seriously hampered by an abject admiration for Ernest Hemingway." In 1938, she published "Young Man with a Horn, " a novel about a white jazz musician, which earned critical praise and eventually became a movie starring Kirk Douglas. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 and, the next year, published "Trio," a novel whose frank portrayal of a lesbian relationship proved too scandalous for the times; Baker and her husband adapted the novel as a play in 1944, but it was quickly shut down because of protests. Her final novel, "Cassandra at the Wedding, " examined the relationship between two exceptionally close sisters, whom Howard Baker asserted were based on both Baker herself and the couple's two daughters. Baker died in 1968 of cancer. |