Nicholson Baker, American novelist and essayist
Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. His early novels such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature were distinguished by their minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Out of a total of ten novels, three are erotica: Vox, The Fermata and House of Holes. Among others, Baker has published articles in Harper's Magazine, the London Review of Books and The New Yorker.

Baker also writes non-fiction. A book about his relationship with John Updike, U and I: A True Story, was published in 1991. He created the American Newspaper Repository in 1999. He then wrote about the American library system in his 2001 nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, for which he received a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Calw Hermann Hesse Prize for the German translation. A pacifist, he wrote Human Smoke about the buildup to World War II. Baker has also written about and edited Wikipedia.