Asa Baber was an American author, former Marine, and columnist for Playboy. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, Baber was involved in several incidents of petty mischief before his grandmother arranged for him to attend the Lawrenceville Academy, a prestigious boarding school in New Jersey. Baber went on to Princeton University where he joined the United States Marine Corps Platoon Leader Corps. After graduation in 1958, he was commissioned and served in the Marine Corps until 1961, achieving the rank of Captain, and participating in several covert actions in Laos. His military experience became material for several essays and, finally, his first book, Land of a Million Elephants, published in 1971, and serialized in Playboy. Baber performed his graduate work at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop. From 1969 through 1975 Baber was a professor of English at the University of Hawaii. He was so beloved that, when the Chicago Sun-Times published an article about him in 2002 (focusing largely on his failing health), dozens of former students wrote to him to re-establish contact and offer support.
