Young Man with a Horn

Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it courses with the verve and swing of the music that defined an era.
 
From the beginning, Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the boss at the Cotton Club that he was underage or to the folks in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out with nothing in the slums of LA, but there was a kind of fate to his ending up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But where instinct and drive are all you need to take you far in music, they aren't enough to make a life work. 
 
Baker took her inspiration for Young Man with a Horn from the tragic life of Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.

DOROTHY DODDS BAKER (1907-1968) was born in Missoula, Montana, and raised in California. After having a few short stories published, Baker turned to writing full-time, and in 1938 she published Young Man with a Horn, which earned critical praise and eventually became a movie. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1942 and, the next year, published  Trio, a novel whose frank portrayal of a lesbian relationship proved too scandalous for the times. Her final novel, Cassandra at the Wedding, is also available from NYFRB Classics. GARY GIDDINS was a music critic for The Village Voice, where his column Weather Bird ran for thirty years. He has contributed articles about music, mostly jazz, to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation and Vanity Fair, among others.