E. L. Doctorow

• 1. Introduction

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  Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born on the 6th of January 1931 in the Bronx, named after Edgar Allan Poe by parents who ran a small music shop and dreamed in the shadow of great American literature. He died on the 21st of July 2015, and when the news reached the White House, President Barack Obama called him "one of America's greatest novelists." That is not a verdict that arrived easily or quickly. It was earned across twelve novels, three volumes of short fiction, a stage drama, and nearly six decades of navigating the terrain between historical fact and invented life. What made Doctorow unusual was not that he wrote about the past. Many novelists do. What set him apart was how he entered it: placing imagined characters alongside Sigmund Freud, J. P. Morgan, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and asking readers to accept all of them as equally real. How did a child from the Bronx build that method? What drew him into the publishing world before he could fully commit to fiction? And what does it mean to win the National Book Critics Circle Award not once, not twice, but three separate times?

• 2. A Bronx Education

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  At the Bronx High School of Science, Doctorow found himself surrounded by mathematically gifted students and felt out of place. His response was practical: he retreated to the office of the school's literary magazine, Dynamo, which published his first literary effort. He then enrolled in a journalism class simply to carve out more time to write. That early hunger for language shaped the direction he took at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he majored in philosophy, acted in theater productions, and studied under the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom. He joined the Middle Kenyon Association and befriended Richard H. Collin. Graduating with honors in 1952, he moved to Columbia University for a year of graduate study in English drama, and then the U.S. Army intervened. During 1954 and 1955, he served as a corporal in the Signal Corps in West Germany. It was during that posting that he married Helen Esther Setzer, a fellow Columbia student. When he returned to New York, he took a job as a reader for a motion picture company. The sheer volume of Westerns he read there began to irritate and eventually inspire him, nudging him toward a first novel that started as a parody of the genre and gradually became something more serious.

• 3. Nine Years Behind a Desk

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  Doctorow's first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, appeared in 1960 to positive reviews. Wirt Williams of The New York Times described it as "taut and dramatic, exciting and successfully symbolic." But fiction alone could not yet pay the bills, and for the next nine years Doctorow worked as a book editor. His first post was at New American Library, where his authors included Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand. From 1964 to 1969, he served as editor in chief of The Dial Press, a publishing branch of New American Library, working with James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines, and William Kennedy. He also published his second novel, Big As Life, in 1966, but later denied permissions to have it republished. When he finally left publishing in 1969 to write full time, he accepted a visiting writer post at the University of California, Irvine. There he completed The Book of Daniel in 1971, a freely fictionalized account of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Guardian called it a "masterpiece." The New York Times, in the words of critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, said it launched Doctorow into "the first rank of American writers."

• 4. The Ragtime Method

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  Ragtime arrived in 1975, written at his home in New Rochelle, New York. The Modern Library editorial board would later name it one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. The book's technique was the clearest expression of what novelist Jay Parini called "a kind of detached but arresting presentation of history that mingled real characters with fictional ones in ways that became his signature manner." Freud and Carl Jung share a ride at Coney Island. Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan appear in the same scene. The fictional and the documented exist on the same plane. Reviewer John Brooks observed that the novels were "alive enough never to smell the research in old newspaper files that they must have required." Parini framed the underlying conviction this way: Doctorow "showed us again and again that our past is our present, and that those not willing to grapple with 'what happened' will be condemned to repeat its worst errors." Doctorow himself resisted the label of political novelist, arguing that the language of politics could not contain the complexity of fiction. He saw labels generally as a distraction and, in his own phrase, the "paradox of his career." The National Book Critics Circle Award for Ragtime in 1975 was only the first of three times he would receive that prize.

• 5. Awards and Ongoing Work

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  Billy Bathgate, published in 1989, brought Doctorow the National Book Critics Circle Award for the second time, along with the PEN/Faulkner Award and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1990. The novel was adapted into a film in 1991 starring Dustin Hoffman. World's Fair had already won the National Book Award in 1986. The March, his 2005 novel, earned him the National Book Critics Circle Award a third time and a second PEN/Faulkner Award in 2006. He was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. The Broadway musical adaptation of Ragtime opened in 1998 and won four Tony Awards. The film version had appeared in 1981. Adaptations of his work stretched across decades: Welcome to Hard Times as a 1967 film starring Henry Fonda; Daniel in 1983 starring Timothy Hutton; Jolene in 2008 starring Jessica Chastain; and Wakefield in 2016, starring Bryan Cranston, released after his death. In 2001, Doctorow donated his papers to the Fales Library of New York University, where he held the Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professorship of English and American Letters. Marvin Taylor, the library's director, described him as "one of the most important American novelists of the 20th century."

• 6. The Classroom and the Page

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  Teaching ran alongside writing throughout Doctorow's career. He held posts at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Drama, the University of Utah, the University of California, Irvine, and Princeton University. In 2011, he spoke at St. Francis University about failure and authenticity and how both forces shaped the way his stories were told. In 2012, he addressed City University of New York on the effectiveness of non-linear narratives when writing historical fiction. His own account of why he became a writer reached back to childhood reading: "I was a child who read everything I could get my hands on. Eventually, I asked of a story not only what was to happen next, but how is this done? How am I made to live from words on a page?" His final collection of short stories, All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories, appeared in 2011. His final novel, Andrew's Brain, was published in 2014. A posthumous collection of Nation essays, Citizen Doctorow: Notes on Art and Politics, appeared in 2015. Doctorow died of lung cancer on the 21st of July 2015, aged 84, in Manhattan, and is interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, not far from where his father once ran a small music shop.