E. L. Doctorow

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E.L. Doctorow (born 1931) is widely regarded as one of America's pre-eminent novelists of the 20th Century. His work is philosophically probing, employing an adventurous prose style, and the use of historical and quasi-historical figures, situations, and settings. Politically active and outspoken, Doctorow urges other writers to follow his lead in expressing their opinions about issues outside the literary community.

Edgar Laurence Doctorow was born on January 6, 1931 in the Bronx, New York. He was named after the great poet and short story writer Edgar Allen Poe, who had also lived in the Bronx. Doctorow's parents were both second-generation Americans who descended from Russian Jews. His mother, Rose (Levine) Doctorow, was an accomplished pianist. His father, David Richard Doctorow, owned a music shop. When his business was wiped out during the Depression, he sold home appliances to support the family.

Doctorow's household was rife with literary, intellectual, and political discussion. He would later characterize his childhood milieu as "a lower middle-class environment of generally enlightened socialist sensibility." Both Doctorow and his older brother had aspirations of being novelists. "I always knew that writing was my calling," Doctorow told Time magazine. For a long time, however, he would resist this impulse, on the advice of friends and family. "People told me to look for physical labor and under no circumstances to get involved with the book business in Manhattan."

Education

Upon finishing grade school, Doctorow attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. He then enrolled at Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio, a liberal arts school known to be a hub of literary study. One of Doctorow's professors at Kenyon was the renowned poet and critic, John Crowe Ransom. At this point, Doctorow was not focused on a literary career, however, preferring to major in philosophy. He also tried his hand at acting, appearing on stage in a number of campus productions.

After earning his undergraduate degree with honors in 1952, Doctorow moved on to graduate study in English drama at New York's Columbia University in the autumn of 1952. Here he was introduced to the work of the German Romantic playwright Heinrich Von Kleist, whose writing had a profound effect on the young student. Doctorow later modeled the protagonist of his most famous novel, Ragtime on the hero of one of Kleist's novels.

While studying at Columbia, Doctorow met and married Helen Setzer, a fellow graduate student. He was drafted into the Army in 1953 and was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, where Helen gave birth to the couple's first child. Upon leaving the service, Doctorow returned to New York, where he got a job at the reservations desk at La Guardia Airport. Tired of this, he moved on to a position as an "expert reader" for Columbia Pictures. His responsibilities included reading a novel a day and writing a 1200-word critique evaluating its cinematic potential. Doctorow acknowledged that the job gave him insights into the structure and pacing of genre novels that he would later use in his own writing.

Early Novels

In 1959, Doctorow accepted a job as an editor for the New American Library. He remained there until 1964, using his free time to work on his own fiction. In 1960, Doctorow published his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. A Western genre story, it was set in the newly settled Dakota Territory of the 1800s. The tale was told from the point of view of the mayor of the frontier town of Hard Times, in the form of a series of journal entries. Critics responded favorably, and the book was later turned into a motion picture starring Henry Fonda. Although Doctorow was now an established novelist, he was still unable to support his family entirely through his writing. He, therefore, accepted the post of editor-in-chief at Dial Press in 1964.

In 1966, Doctorow completed work on his second novel, Big as Life. This time he chose science fiction as his genre, spinning an outlandish tale about a group of people who band together to fight off two giant humanoids attacking Manhattan. The book was perplexing to some reviewers; others dismissed it as potboiler science fiction. Doctorow later withdrew the novel from print entirely, apparently disappointed at the critical reception it received.

Acclaim for Daniel

As editor-in-chief at Dial Press, Doctorow spent the last few years of the 1960s working with some of the most talented authors of the time, including Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Richard Condon. But he quit his position in 1969 in order to devote more time to his own writing. The fruit of that effort was Doctorow's first non-genre novel, The Book of Daniel (1971).

The title character was based on Michael Meeropol, the son of executed Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Doctorow believed the execution was a major political crime of the 1950s and tried to express his confusion and outrage through the character of Daniel. He did extensive research into the lives of the Rosenbergs in preparation for writing his book. The hard work paid off, as critics almost universally praised the new work. The Book of Daniel was nominated for a National Book Award and made part of the required reading list at a number of colleges and universities.

Awards and Riches

It took Doctorow four years to produce his next novel, but critics found it worth the wait. Ragtime, set in the decade prior to World War I, wove together a number of interconnected story lines, featuring both real-life and imaginary characters. Historical figures such as Harry Houdini, William Howard Taft, and Sigmund Freud appear in its pages, though the major themes of the novel revolve around the fictional Coalhouse Walker, a black piano player persecuted for a crime he did not commit. The novel was an enormous critical and commercial success, fulfilling Doctorow's own vow that the book would reach vast new constituencies. Ragtime sold 200,000 copies in hardcover in its first year alone, and netted a lucrative $2 million for the paperback sale. It won Doctorow the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was adapted as a feature film in 1982 and a Broadway musical in 1997.

With his first novel of the 1980's, Loon Lake, Doctorow returned once again to historical fiction. Set in and around the Adirondacks during the Great Depression, the book follows the wanderings of an ambitious drifter. Its experimental prose style and non-linear structure made it a difficult read for some, but critical response was mostly positive. For his next book, 1984's Lives of the Poets, Doctorow eschewed the novel form entirely, preferring to collect six short stories and a novella, all of which dealt with the relationship between art and politics.

Artist and Advocate

During this same period, Doctorow himself was exploring that relationship through his actions and public pronouncements. Now an internationally famous and acclaimed author, he found time in his hectic schedule to publicly expound on his views about political and cultural matters. In 1980, Doctorow appeared before a Senate subcommittee to decry the encroachment of the entertainment industry into publishing. In 1983, the outspoken author delivered a scathing commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College in which he excoriated Ronald Reagan as "the most foolish and insufficient president in our history." Later that year he traveled to Beijing, China, where he lambasted American officials for encouraging the Chinese to translate and publish American books without duly compensating the American writers.

Doctorow became extremely active within the literary community. In 1982, he was appointed the Lewis and Loretta Gluckman Chair of American Literature at New York University. In 1984, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The following year he appeared at the Twentieth International PEN Conference to urge America's writers to speak out on political issues. Doctorow later had published a distillation of that argument in essay form entitled "The Passion of Our Calling."

Bronx Novels

Doctorow's sixth novel, World's Fair, appeared in 1986. In it, Doctorow tackled a new literary form, the memoir, writing from the point of view of one Edgar Altschuler, a young man growing up in the Bronx during the Great Depression. Again, real historical personages and events like the Hindenburg disaster and the New York World's Fair of 1939, gave depth and verisimilitude to the narrative. Hailed as a triumph by literary critics, World's Fair was awarded the American Book Award for fiction.

The Bronx again provided the setting for Doctorow's next novel, Billy Bathgate, published in 1989. The book again explores the relationship between history and myth, as it follows the title character through his immersion in the gangster underworld of the 1930's. Young Bathgate's mentor throughout is the real-life gangster, Dutch Schultz. One of Doctorow's most accessible and accomplished novels, Billy Bathgate became an international bestseller and earned Doctorow the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Doctorow in the 1990's

In the 1990's, Doctorow slowed his pace somewhat, publishing only one major new work of fiction. He purchased a summer home on Long Island and organized a three-day annual retreat weekend called "The Sag Harbor Initiative." There artists and politicians gathered to discuss major issues of the day.

Doctorow's eighth novel, The Waterworks, appeared in 1994. Set in New York City in the aftermath of the Civil War, the suspenseful narrative is told by an old, wry newspaper editor. Its real protagonist is Martin Pemberton, one of the paper's employees, who embarks on a quest to find the father he thought was long dead. Laced with historical and contemporary allusions, the book echoes earlier Doctorow works in its sweeping examination of the interaction among different social classes.

Further Reading

Harter, Carol C. and James R. Thompson, E.L. Doctorow Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Levine, Paul, E.L. Doctorow Methuen, 1985.

Morris, Christopher D., Conversations with E.L. Doctorow University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Parks, John G., E.L. Doctorow Continuum, 1991.

Quotes:

"I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad."

"There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative."

"Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen."

"You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again."

"In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment."

"The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century."

See more famous quotes by E. L. Doctorow

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E. L. Doctorow
E.L. Doctorow, (photograph by Mark Sobczak)
Born	January 6, 1931 (1931-01-06) (age 78) Bronx, New York
Occupation	writer, editor, professor
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Kenyon College, Columbia University
Writing period	1960 - present
Notable work(s)	The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The March
Spouse(s)	Helen Setzer

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (born January 6, 1931, New York, New York) is an American author.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Works 3 See also 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links

Biography

Edgar Lawrence ("E.L.") Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent. He attended city public grade schools and the Bronx High School of Science where, surrounded by mathematically gifted children, he fled to the office of the school literary magazine, Dynamo, where he published his first literary effort, The Beetle, which he describes as ”a tale of etymological self-defamation inspired by my reading of Kafka.”

Doctorow attended Kenyon College, where he studied with the poet and New Critic, John Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions and majored in Philosophy. After graduating with Honors in 1952 he did a year of graduate work in English Drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the army. He served with the Army of Occupation in Germany in 1954-55 as a corporal in the signal corps.

He returned to New York after his military service and took a job as a reader for a motion picture company where he said he had to read so many Westerns that he was inspired to write what became his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. He began the work as a parody of the Western genre, but the piece evolved into a novel that asserted itself as a serious reclamation of the genre before he was through. It was published to positive reviews in 1960.

Doctorow had married a fellow Columbia drama student, Helen Setzer, while in Germany and by the time he had moved on from his reader’s job in 1960 to become an editor at the New American Library, (NAL) a mass market paperback publisher, he was the father of three children. To support his family he would spend nine years as a book editor, first at NAL working with such authors as Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand, and then, in 1964 as Editor-in-chief at The Dial Press, publishing work by James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines and William Kennedy, among others.

In 1969 Doctorow left publishing in order to write, and accepted a position as Visiting Writer at the University of California, Irvine, where he completed The Book of Daniel, a freely fictionalized consideration of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Published in 1971 it was widely acclaimed, called a “masterpiece” by The Guardian, and it launched Doctorow into "the first rank of American writers" according to the New York Times.^[1]

Doctorow’s next book, written in his home in New Rochelle, New York, was Ragtime (1975), since accounted one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library Editorial Board.^[2]

Doctorow’s subsequent work includes the award winning novels World's Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989) and The March (2005); two volumes of short fiction, Lives of the Poets I (1984) and Sweetland Stories (2004); and two volumes of selected essays, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993) and Creationists (2006). He is published in over thirty languages.

He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Drama, the University of Utah and Princeton University. He is currently Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.

Doctorow has donated his papers to the Fales Library of New York University. He is the recipient of the National Humanities Medal conferred at the White House in 1998.^[3]

Works

• (1960) Welcome to Hard Times
• (1966) Big As Life
• (1968) The Songs of Billy Bathgate. [1] Short story; chronicling the career of a folk-rock musician, the tale is told in the form of liner notes. Doctorow would later recycle the protagonists' name for his PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel Billy Bathgate. In an interview published in a compendium of critical analysis of his work, Doctorow claimed that he'd been questioned as to whether or not the protagonist of "Songs" was the son of the protagonist from Billy Bathgate, since the dates of birth given for the protagonists's son in Billy Bathgate correlate to the age of the protagonist from Songs. Doctorow states that, while he had not intended it as such, he has no objection to this view of the characters' lineage. This short story is also mentioned in the song "Sad, Sad, Sad (and Far Away from Home)" by Peter Mulvey.
• (1971) The Book of Daniel. Nominated for a National Book Award, it fictionalized the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.
• (1975) Ragtime Received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; it was adapted for the 1981 film Ragtime (nominated for eight Academy Awards) and again for the Broadway musical Ragtime in 1998 (nominated for twelve Tony Awards).
• (1979) Drinks Before Dinner (play)
• (1980) Loon Lake (novel). Nominated for National Book Award for Fiction in Paperback.
• (1982) American Anthem (A photographic essay)
• (1984) Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella
• (1985) World's Fair. Received the 1986 National Book Award.
• (1989) Billy Bathgate. Won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and received the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the best novel of the previous five-year period.
• (1994) The Waterworks
• (2000) City of God
• (2003) Reporting the Universe[2], Harvard University Press
• (2004) Sweet Land Stories. A New York Times Notable Book.
• (2005) The March, ISBN 0-375-50671-3 Awarded the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. Also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and nominated for the National Book Award.
• (2006) Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006 (Random House, 178 pages)
• (2008) Wakefield (short story) New Yorker 14 Jan. 2008
• (2009) All The Time in the World (short story) Kenyon Review Vol. 31 no. 1
• (2009) Homer and Langley

See also

• The Russian general Dmitry Dokhturov was an ancestor of E. L. Doctorow.^[4]

Notes

1. ^ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. review of 'The Book of Daniel', New York Times, June 7, 1971
2. ^ Staff. Modern Library's 100 Best Novels. Retrieved on 2008-09-05
3. ^ Staff. "Winners of the National Humanities Medal and the Charles Frankel Prize". National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/nationalmedals.html. Retrieved 2008-09-05. 
4. ^ E. L. Doctorow & Christopher D. Morris. Conversations with E.L. Doctorow, University Press of Mississippi, 1999, ISBN 157806144X p. 82

References

• Arana-Ward, Marie. (April 17, 1994). "E. L. Doctorow". The Washington Post, p. X6.
• E.L. Doctorow by Paul Levine, New York: Methuen, 1985.
• Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E.L. Doctorow by Christopher D. Morris, University of Mississippi Press, 1991.
• E.L. Doctorow’s Skeptical Commitment by Michelle M. Tokarczyk, Peter Lang, 2000.
• Conversations with E.L. Doctorow by Christopher D.Morris, University of Mississippi Press, 1999.
• Understanding E.L. Doctorow by Douglas Fowler, University of South Carolina, 1992.
• E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime by Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, Chelsea House, 2001.
• E.L. Doctorow edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 2001.
• E.L. Doctorow: An Annotated Bibliography by Michelle M. Tokarczyk, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 1988.
• Critical Essays on E.L. Doctorow by Ben Siegel, G.K. Hall & Company, 2000.
• The Progressive Era in American Historical Fiction: John Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel and E.L.Doctorow’s Ragtime by Tomas Pospisil, Brno : Masarykova univerzita, 1998.
• Post Modernism: On the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederick Jameson, Duke University Press, 1991.
• The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea by Sam B. Girgus, University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
• The Modern American Novel of Violence by Patrick W. Shaw, Whiston Press, 2000.
• Der Meta=Western: Studien zu E.L. Doctorow, Thomas Berger und Larry McMurtry (Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik)" by Michael Porsche, Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1991.
• E.L. Doctorow:Essays and Conversations by Richard Trenner, Ontario Review Press, 1983.
• Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E.L. Doctorow In the Post Modern Age by John Williams, Camden House, 1996.
• E.L.Doctorow by Carol C. Harter and James R. Thompson, Gale Group, 1996.

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• The Prophet by John Leonard from the New York Review of Books, June 10, 2004.
• Problematized Narratives: History as Friction In E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate by Matthew A. Henry from Critique Magazine.
• The Primal Scene in the Public Domain: E.L.Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel by Naomi Morgenstern from Studies in the Novel, Vol 35, 2003.
• The Young Gangster as Mythic American Hero: E.L.Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate by Minako Baba from Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
• In This Way He Lost Everything: The Price of Satisfaction in E.L.Doctorow’s World’s Fair by Todd McGowan from Critique, Vol 42, 2001.
• Through a Glass Clearly: Vision as Structure in E.L. Doctorow’s Willi by Ann V. Miller from Studies in Short Fiction.
• Why Not Say What Happened: E.L.Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets by Stephen Matterson from Critique.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: E.L. Doctorow

• The Fales Library of NYU's guide to the E.L. Doctorow Papers
• New York State Writers Institute: E. L. Doctorow
• E. L. Doctorow Wins the PEN/Faulkner Award 2006
• "Billy Bathgate Discussion With EL Doctorow" - from November 30, 2004
• Modern Library Editorial Board: Best Novels of 20th Century
• New York Times Book Review
• E. L. Doctorow at Goodreads

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