Red Baker

by Robert Ward, Daniel Woodrell (Introduction)

Overview

When Red Baker, a Larmel steel worker in Baltimore, Maryland, gets laid off from his job he goes crazy: boozing, attempted philandering, running away from his future. Filled with unforgettable characters from Red’s angry but loyal wife, Wanda; his basketball-star son, Ace; his lifelong friend Dog, a casualty of the layoff; and Crystal, the go-go dancer at Lily’s bar who embodies Red’s fantasies of escape. Red Baker is a classic American novel about a man with no identity who tries to replace the one he’s lost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440533891
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/13/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	569 KB

About the Author

Robert Ward is the author of eleven novels, including Four Kinds of Rain, a New York Times Notable Book, Red Baker, winner of the PEN West Award for Best Novel, Shedding Skin, and The Stone Carrier. 

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
After spending more than a few years out of print, Robert Ward's Red Baker, which won the prestigious PEN West prize for Best Novel in 1985, is finally being reissued. With a reverential foreword by Michael Connelly, this story about a Baltimore steelworker's downward spiral into despair after he loses his job is an archetypal "Great American Novel" comparable to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

In the winter of 1983, after spending most of his life working around the forges at Larmel Steel, 40-year-old Red Baker is summarily laid off. With a much cheaper workforce overseas, the company's six-month shutdown is rumored to be permanent. Baker's life is turned upside down in an instant. Possessing only "nontransferable skills," his ordeal at the unemployment office offers no hope. With a wife and teenage son to support, Baker moves from one short-lived minimum wage job to another, becoming increasingly dejected. Things turn from bad to worse: A former coworker in the same predicament commits suicide, and in the same week, Baker's wife, Wanda, and his mistress -- a go-go dancer named Crystal -- both leave him. Increasingly popping pills and drinking hard liquor to cope, Baker turns to one desperate criminal act…

In the book's foreword, Connelly describes this as a literary novel, a crime novel, and a novel of social reflection. "In Red Baker, one man's story becomes our story, his conscious becomes our collective conscious. His journey is our own. I am Red Baker and so are you. It is why it should always be celebrated and always in print." Paul Goat Allen

Ward won the 1985 PEN West Prize for this fanfare-for-the-common-man novel of our eponymous hero's crackup after loosing his job as a steel worker. Baker, a regular blue-collar Joe, descends into a sort of underworld of booze and strip clubs while trying to run away from himself. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal