Larry Baker was raised an air force brat and spent much of his childhood traveling with his family all over the country and then overseas. He started elementary school in Louisiana, went to junior high in the Azores, and graduated from high school in Texas.

Baker, who holds degrees in English from the University of Oklahoma and a doctorate from the University of Iowa, put himself through college by managing movie theaters. He once ran the Admiral Drive-In in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the world's largest outdoor theaters and the inspiration for the Flamingo Drive-In Theatre in his book. During his "movie" career Baker was robbed four times, shot at once, stabbed once, beat up by a motorcycle gang, sold sex education books at intermission, found a dead woman sitting on a toilet at his drive-in, and caused a thirteen-car pileup on an interstate highway nearby with windblown fireworks.

Baker's other jobs have included time as a sportswriter, hotel clerk and house detective, pizza restaurant manager, Pinkerton security guard, ad agency writer, twice-elected and twice-defeated politician, standardized test writer and grader, and a short stint as master-of-ceremonies at a burlesque/strip club.

Baker lives with his wife and two children in Iowa City, Iowa, where he teaches history. He is currently working on his second novel, tentatively titled The Education of Nancy Flynn, the story of a thirty-eight-year-old widow who gets her first job as a teacher at the high school from which she graduated twenty years earlier.

Books by Larry Baker

The Flamingo Rising

by Larry Baker