After finishing her Master's, Baker taught at a small preparatory school until the mid-30s when she left to pursue a writing career.
Her love for jazz resulted in Baker's first novel, Young Man with a Horn (1938), based on the life of cornet player Bix Beiderbecke.
Three of her novels include lesbian-leaning characters, although in each case their sexuality is slightly warped: "too insistently smart, too anxiously empty, a little malicious.
"[3] In 1950, Young Man with a Horn was made into a movie of the same name with Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.
[2] Baker and her husband made the novel into a play, but it was quickly taken off Broadway on grounds of obscenity, because of its lesbian themes.
In a redemptive image at the end of the novel, Cassandra walks across the Golden Gate Bridge with thoughts, not of suicide, but of life and art.
"[2] Howard Baker asserted that the characters in Cassandra at the Wedding were based on Dorothy herself and the couple's own two daughters.
[3] After the failure of Baker's Trio, the family moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to a ranch in Terra Bella, California.
In between writing novels, she wrote plays, raised her children, and ran a theater and a citrus farm.