"Growing Up"

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Russell Baker's Growing Up should be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for both content and style. Baker has written a work which humanely and vividly portrays the coming-of-age of a young man at in an era crucial to the development of the United States as a modern nation---the era of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Baker's book is valuable for its entertainment value, its humor, its humanity, its poignancy, and for its masterful and seemingly effortless blending of the personal and the historical. We come to know not only this young man and his family, but also the spirit of the nation in this turbulent time.

Baker is a well-respected journalist who in this book looks back over his childhood and young manh

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his more laid-back and philosophical nature (Baker 17-18). Whereas he seeks in life a deeper and more analytical understanding of life, Doris develops a more materialistic and conservative life style. What makes Doris important in the book is what makes Baker's father important as well. Both Doris the sister and Baker's father give the reader the impression of being secondary characters, along, in fact, with every other character but Baker and his mother. Doris has more closely followed her mother's activist philosophy, while Russell, certainly finding success, nevertheless developed a more leisurely and inclusive sense of life than his younger sister. Another secondary character effectively portrayed by the author is his father. While the mother stands out as the bulwark, if not the tyrant of the family, the father's presence is more in the background, and brief, for he dies at an early age. The significance of the role of the father in the book and in Baker's life is that he was such a relatively weak character in comparison to Lucy. Whereas Lucy from the first page to the last appears to the reader to be a "mean old lady" (Baker 344) as Baker's wife Mimi puts it, the father is a quieter, kinder, less demanding character, a

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