E. L. Doctorow

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

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

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. There, he published his first literary effort, The Beetle, which he describes as ”a tale of etymological self-defamation inspired by my reading of Kafka.”^{[citation needed]}

Doctorow attended Kenyon College in Ohio, 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 completed a year of graduate work in English drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the army. He served with the Army as a corporal in the signal corps during the Allied occupation of Germany in 1954-55.

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 University 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 spent 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, accepting 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.

Doctorow’s next book, written in his home in New Rochelle, New York, was Ragtime (1975), since named one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library editorial board.

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, the University of California, Irvine, and Princeton University. He is the Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. He has donated his papers to the Fales Library of New York University.

Awards and honors

In 1998, Doctorow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

Doctorow is the recipient of the National Humanities Medal conferred at the White House in 1998.

Works

Novels

• (1960) Welcome to Hard Times
• (1966) Big As Life
• (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).
• (1980) Loon Lake (novel). Nominated for National Book Award for Fiction in Paperback.
• (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
• (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.
• (2009) Homer & Langley

Stories

• (1968) "The Songs of Billy Bathgate" (short story)
• (1984) Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella
• (2004) Sweet Land Stories. A New York Times Notable Book.
• (2011) All The Time In The World: New And Selected Stories.

Plays

• (1979) Drinks Before Dinner (play)

Other

• (1982) American Anthem (A photographic essay)
• (1995) Poets and Presidents: Selected Essays, 1977-92
• (2003) Reporting the Universe[2], Harvard University Press
• (2006) Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006 (Random House, 178 pages)
• (2008) Wakefield (short story) New Yorker 14 January 2008
• (2009) All The Time in the World (short story) Kenyon Review Vol. 31 no. 1

See also

• The Russian general Dmitry Dokhturov is an ancestor of E. L. Doctorow.

References

• Arana-Ward, Marie. "E. L. Doctorow," The Washington Post, April 17, 1994, p. X6.
• Baba, Minako. "The Young Gangster as Mythic American Hero: E.L.Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate," in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
• Bloom, Harold (Ed.). E.L. Doctorow Chelsea House, 2001.
• E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, Chelsea House, 2001.
• Fowler, Douglas. Understanding E.L. Doctorow University of South Carolina, 1992.
• Girgus, Sam B. The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
• Harter, Carol C. and James R. Thompson. E.L.Doctorow Gale Group, 1996.
• Henry, Matthew A. "Problematized Narratives: History as Friction in E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate," Critique Magazine.
• Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Duke University Press, 1991.
• Leonard, John. "The Prophet," New York Review of Books, June 10, 2004.
• Levine, Paul. E.L. Doctorow New York: Methuen, 1985.
• Matterson, Stephen. "Why Not Say What Happened: E.L.Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets," Critique.
• McGowan, Todd. "In This Way He Lost Everything: The Price of Satisfaction in E.L.Doctorow’s World’s Fair," Critique, vol. 42, 2001.
• Miller, Ann V. "Through a Glass Clearly: Vision as Structure in E.L. Doctorow’s Willi" in Studies in Short Fiction.
• Morgenstern, Naomi. "The Primal Scene in the Public Domain: E.L.Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel," in Studies in the Novel, vol. 35, 2003.
• Morris, Christopher D. Conversations with E.L. Doctorow University of Mississippi Press, 1999.
• Morris, Christopher D. Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E.L. Doctorow University of Mississippi Press, 1991.
• Porsche, Michael. Der Meta-Western: Studien zu E.L. Doctorow, Thomas Berger und Larry McMurtry (Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik)" Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1991.
• Pospisil, Tomas. The Progressive Era in American Historical Fiction: John Dos Passos’ 'The 42nd Parallel and E.L.Doctorow’s Ragtime Brno : Masarykova univerzita, 1998.
• Rasmussen, Eric Dean. "E. L. Doctorow's Vicious Eroticism: Dangerous Affect in The Book of Daniel. symplokē 18.1–2. (2011): 190-219. https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/symploke/summary/v018/18.1-2.rasmussen.html
• Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence Whiston Press, 2000.
• Siegel, Ben. Critical Essays on E.L. Doctorow G.K. Hall & Company, 2000.
• Tokarczyk, Michelle M. E.L. Doctorow: An Annotated Bibliography Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 1988.
• Tokarczyk, Michelle M. E.L. Doctorow’s Skeptical Commitment Peter Lang, 2000.
• Trenner, Richard. E.L. Doctorow:Essays and Conversations Ontario Review Press, 1983.
• Williams, John. Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E.L. Doctorow In the Post Modern Age Camden House, 1996.

External links

• Guide to the E.L. Doctorow Papers
• George Plimpton (Winter 1986). "E. L. Doctorow, The Art of Fiction No. 94". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2718/the-art-of-fiction-no-94-e-l-doctorow. 
• "Billy Bathgate Discussion With EL Doctorow" - from November 30, 2004
• Modern Library Editorial Board: Best Novels of 20th Century
• New York Times review of The Book of Daniel