Kevin Baker is an American novelist and journalist. He was born in Englewood, New Jersey and grew up in New Jersey and Rockport, Massachusetts.

As a youth Baker worked on the Gloucester Daily Times, covering school-boy sports, as well as local town meetings and other civic affairs. He graduated from Columbia, where he majored in political science, in 1980. Baker resides in New York, where he is a contributing editor to Harper's magazine as well as a columnist with American Heritage magazine, and a regular contributor to The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.