David Grayson

Ray Stannard Baker (April 17, 1870 - July 12, 1946) (also known by the pseudonym David Grayson) was an American journalist, historian, biographer, and writer. Baker was born in Lansing, Michigan. After graduating from Michigan State Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), he attended law school at the University of Michigan in 1891, and in 1892 began his career as a journalist on Chicago News, where he covered Pullman and Coxey Hits. Army in 1894. In 1896, Ray Stannard Baker married Jesse Beale. They had four children: Alice Beale (1897), James Stannard (1889), Roger Denio (1902), and Rachel Moore (1906). In 1898, Baker joined McClure's, a pioneering disgusting magazine, and quickly gained fame with Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. He was also fond of fiction, writing children's stories for Youth's Companion, and a series of nine volumes about rural life in America, the first of which was called Adventures in Contentment (1910) under the pseudonym David Grayson, which reached millions of readers around the world. In 1910, he moved to the city of Amherst, Massachusetts. In 1912, Baker supported President Woodrow Wilson's candidacy, which led to close relations between the two men, and in 1918 Wilson sent Baker to Europe to study the military situation. He was associated with the future president of the Czechoslovak Republic, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk in America since May 1918. During the peace talks, Baker served as Wilson's press secretary at Versailles. He eventually published 15 volumes on Wilson and internationalism, including the six-volume Woodrow Wilson Publications (1925-1927) with William Edward Dodd and the eight-volume Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (1927-1939), the last two volumes of which received the Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography in 1940. He was an adviser to the 1944 film, Darryl F. Zanuck, Wilson. Baker wrote two autobiographies, Native Americans (1941) and American Chronicle (1945). Baker died of a heart attack in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is buried there at Wildwood Cemetery. The buildings were named after Ray Stannard Baker and David Grayson (his pseudonym). Grayson Hall Hostel is located at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. David Grayson Elementary School is located in Waterford, Michigan. The Baker Hall Academic Building is located at the University of Michigan.