Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015) was an American novelist, editor, and professor, known for his historical fiction. He wrote three volumes of short fiction, a stage drama, and twelve novels, including the award-winning Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005). Like many of his other works, these placed fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts with known historical figures, and used various narrative styles. His stories were recognized for their originality and versatility, and Doctorow was praised for his audacity and imagination.
Doctorow received many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award three times (for Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March). He was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. At the time of his death, President Barack Obama called him "one of America's greatest novelists".
Early life
Doctorow was born on January 6, 1931, in the Bronx, the son of Rose (Levine) and David Richard Doctorow, second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent who named him after Edgar Allan Poe. His father ran a small music shop. Doctorow attended city public grade schools and the Bronx High School of Science, where he wrote for the school literary magazine, Dynamo, which first published his work. He then enrolled in a journalism class to increase his opportunities to write.
Doctorow attended Kenyon College, where he studied with John Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions, and majored in philosophy. He also joined the Middle Kenyon Association and befriended Richard H. Collin. After graduating with honors in 1952, he completed a year of graduate work in English drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War. In 1954 and 1955, he served as a corporal in the Signal Corps in West Germany.
Back in New York after military service, Doctorow worked as a reader for a motion picture company. Reading so many Westerns inspired his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. Begun as a parody of western fiction, it evolved into a reclamation of the genre. It was published to positive reviews in 1960, with Wirt Williams of The New York Times calling it "taut and dramatic, exciting and successfully symbolic".
When asked how he decided to become a writer, Doctorow said: "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? And so I became a writer."
Career
"When you'd read Edgar's manuscripts, it was done. That's just the kind of writer he was; he got everything right the first time. I can't think of any editorial problem we had. Even remotely. Nothing."
Novelist Jay Parini has commended Doctorow's skill at writing fictionalized history in a unique style, "a kind of detached but arresting presentation of history that mingled real characters with fictional ones in ways that became his signature manner". In Ragtime, for example, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung share a ride at Coney Island, and Henry Ford meets J. P. Morgan.
Despite the immense research Doctorow did to create stories based on real events and real characters, reviewer John Brooks wrote that they are nevertheless "alive enough never to smell the research in old newspaper files that they must have required". Doctorow demonstrated in most of his novels "that the past is very much alive, but that it's not easily accessed", Parini wrote. "We tell and retell stories, and these stories illuminate our daily lives. He 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's fiction combines deeply traditional writing with historical exploration. Although he was called a political novelist, Doctorow rejected this label because he did not believe that the language of politics fit into the complexity of fiction. Doctorow called such labels a distraction and the "paradox of his career".
Personal life and death
In 1954, Doctorow married fellow Columbia University student Helen Esther Setzer while serving in the U.S. Army in West Germany. The couple had three children.
In his later years, Doctorow focused on lecturing on his experience of academia and how to construct literature through the lens of historical context. In 2011, he spoke at Saint Francis University about failure and authenticity in his work. In 2012, he spoke at City University of New York about the effectiveness of non-linear narratives.
Doctorow was a member of the Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Israel group. In 1984, he signed a letter protesting German arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
1999: the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, which is given annually to recognize outstanding achievement in American literature at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival in Rockville, Maryland, where Fitzgerald, his wife, and his daughter are buried.
↑The film version of Ragtime did not use the screenplay adaptation that Doctorow wrote. According to the publisher's note for Three Screenplays, Doctorow wrote screenplay adaptations of three of his works― The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake: "Each of these screenplays has undergone a different fate. Doctorow's script for Daniel was made into a feature film by director Sidney Lumet in 1983. The monumental Ragtime screenplay he wrote for director Robert Altman was to have been filmed as either a six-hour feature film or a ten-hour television series. When Altman was replaced on the project by Milos Forman, a shorter, more conventional script was commissioned from another writer. In 1981, Doctorow adapted Loon Lake, but this challenging work has yet to be filmed."
↑Though Doctorow believed that Big as Life was a failure, in a 1991 interview he said he thought he could fix the novel and "make it work," implying that he wouldn't let it back in print until it was revised.
↑"Literary giant". Kenyon News. Gambier, OH: Kenyon College. July 22, 2015. Archived from the original on November 4, 2015. Retrieved November 4, 2015.
Arana-Ward, Marie (April 17, 1994). "E.L. Doctorow". Washington Post. p.X6.
Baba, Minako (Summer 1993). "The Young Gangster as Mythic American Hero: E.L.Doctorow's Billy Bathgate". Varieties of Ethnic Criticism. 18 (2). Oxford University Press: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS): 33–46. doi:10.2307/467932. JSTOR467932.
Porsche, Michael. (1991). Der Meta-Western: Studien zu E.L. Doctorow, Thomas Berger und Larry McMurtry (Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik). Verlag Die Blaue Eule.
Pospisil, Tomas (1998). The Progressive Era in American Historical Fiction: John Dos Passos' 'The 42nd Parallel and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. Brno: Masarykova univerzita.
Shaw, Patrick W. (2000). The Modern American Novel of Violence. Whiston Press.
Siegel, Ben (2000). Critical Essays on E.L. Doctorow. G.K. Hall & Company.
Tokarczyk, Michelle M. (1988). E.L. Doctorow: An Annotated Bibliography. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities.
Tokarczyk, Michelle M. (2000). E.L. Doctorow's Skeptical Commitment. Peter Lang.
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