Russell Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New York Times columnist, died on Monday night at his home in Leesburg, Va. The Times’s obituary, which called Baker “one of the best-known newspaper humorists of his time,” noted that his “whimsical, irreverent ‘Observer’ column appeared in The New York Times and hundreds of other newspapers for 36 years and turned a backwoods-born Virginian into one of America’s most celebrated writers.” If you’ve never read any of his 15 books — or if you’d like to rediscover some old favorites — these six books are a fine way to start.

[Read The Times’s obituary of Russell Baker.]

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“Have a nice day has replaced ‘This is a stickup’ as the most frequently spoken four-word sentence in the American language.”

So This Is Depravity

Baker’s collection of columns from 1973 to 1980 is simply this: “observations on the foibles and peccadilloes of the human race.” In 1979, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for this “good-humored commentary.”

Image Credit... Congdon & Weed

“Writing a book is quite different from telling amusing anecdotes over the second bottle of Bordeaux, as I discovered.”

Growing Up

Baker’s memoir, published in 1982, would go on to win the 1983 Pulitzer for biography. In the Times’s review, Richard Lingeman called the book “touching and funny, a hopeless muddle of sadness and laughter that bears a suspicious resemblance to real life.” A year later, Edwin McDowell wrote a column about the book’s success.