Russell Baker

(Wikipedia) Russell Wayne Baker (born August 14, 1925) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer known for his satirical commentary and self-critical prose, as well as for his autobiography, Growing Up.
Baker was the eldest of three children born to Benny and Lucy Elizabeth Baker in Morrisonville, Virginia. His first sister, Doris, was born in 1927, and after three years his second sister Audrey was born. Unfortunately, due to being desperately poor during the great depression, his mother had to make a heartbreaking decision and gave Audrey up for adoption to her brother-in-law and his wife . Baker's father had died of diabetes by this point when Russell was five, so his mother had to move the family to Belleville, New Jersey to live with her brother and sister-in-law. Later they moved to urban Baltimore where he graduated from the Baltimore City College high school in 1943 and received his B.A. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in 1947. At the age of eleven as a self professed bump on a log, he made the decision to be come a writer since he figured "what writers did couldn't even be classified as work". Continued