CURRENT AFFAIRS

Detailed explanation-1: -Russell Wayne Baker (August 14, 1925 – January 21, 2019) was an American journalist, narrator, writer of Pulitzer Prize-winning satirical commentary and self-critical prose, and author of Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Growing Up (1983).

Detailed explanation-2: -Baker was born in 1925 in Loudon County, Virginia, and spent his boyhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Following pilot training with the Navy during World War II, he returned to Baltimore to complete his degree at Johns Hopkins University (English Literature, 1947) and stayed in town to work for The Baltimore Sun.

Detailed explanation-3: -Repeat winners Ten people have won the Pulitzer for Biography or Autobiography twice: Burton J. Hendrick, 1923, 1929. Allan Nevins, 1933, 1937.

Detailed explanation-4: -Russell Baker, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose 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, died on Monday at his home in Leesburg, Va. He was 93.

Detailed explanation-5: -This second volume of autobiography picked up where the first ended-with his first job as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun-and continued through 1963. In 1993 Baker succeeded Alistair Cooke as host of the television program Masterpiece Theatre. In that same year he published Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor.