[Russell Baker] writes serious funny things usually with the purpose of pointing out absurdities, including economists' prevarications, the pretensions of technology, and government prose that has not noticeably improved during the Reagan monarchy. Whatever the targets of his attacks, Russell Baker is a defender of the greatest heritage of this nation—of which conservatives ought to be more respectful than they often are—the American English language. Within the New York Times Russell Baker compares as a grammarian to the house conservative William Safire somewhat as Red Smith compares to Howard Cosell. But Baker is more than a grammarian. He is a master of the American language.

[Growing Up] is a revelation of that fact. In it he recounts the first 24 years of his life as the son of an independent and deep-rooted Virginian family, people as frugal and brave as their American ancestors two hundred years before had been. One paragraph of his description of family life in the Depression is worth everything Studs Terkel ever wrote. The Depression brought families close together…. [Baker's] was an unusual family. His childhood was not an unhappy one. I have always thought that Tolstoy's famous first sentence of Anna Karenina—"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"—was a lot of guff, and that its very opposite is true. (p. 331)

When a writer equipped with a minimum of talent thinks or writes about undramatic phases of his life, he can always fall back on color, and attempt to describe things and scenes in souped-up prose. But writing is not quite like painting, and even in painting, color cannot be altogether a substitute for draftsmanship. Baker's prose is like clear water. His descriptions do not depend on colors; they reflect them. Here is a sentence in which sensitive readers may glimpse that combination of irony and tenderness and natural virtuosity which is the mark of a great writer. Russell Baker's grandfather had 11 sons. His devotion to Christian worship "was remarkable. He required a minimum of two church services each Sunday to keep his soul in sound repair, and after partaking of the Gospel at morning and afternoon servings he often set out across the fields for a third helping at dusk if he heard of a church with lamps lit for nocturnal psalming."

Baker was born in 1925, when H. L. Mencken, another Baltimorean, was proclaiming that an American language had come into being, a language that was more democratic and more straightforward and telling than what the English language, with all of its Latinisms and emasculated suggestiveness, had become. Mencken was wrong. During the twentieth century the American language—including the literary language—became intellectualized and bureaucratized, cumbrous and soggy. Even Hemingway was no exception to this, since his indubitable talent was not matched by sufficient wisdom or integrity. The result was a style that was ephemeral, closer to O. Henry or to Maupassant than to us. But now comes this wondrous apparition—no, a solid reality—in our midst. Here is a modest book, a modest autobiographical story, with a title that is as modest as it is truthful and precise. It is an American classic, containing an American style that leaves Hemingway and Mencken and Henry Adams—the prose of the first, the thesis of the second, and the pessimism of the third—behind. It ought to be put before every young American to see what can be done with the great language of a nation. (pp. 331-32)