Doctorow, E. L., 1931-2015

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931. The grandson of Jewish immigrants from Russia, he grew up on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx and attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he showed an early interest in the arts evidenced by the inclusion of a poem, short story, and painting in his high school literary journal, Dynamo. These interests were further developed at Kenyon College, where he studied with John Crowe Ransom and shared the stage with Paul Newman and the page with fellow poet, James Wright. Doctorow graduated with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, receiving a B.A in Philosophy, before continuing with a year of graduate work at Columbia University. He married Helen Seltser amidst a two-year stint in the U.S. Army (1953-55); they had three children: Jenny, Caroline, and Richard.

After a brief period as a reservations clerk at LaGuardia Airport, Doctorow began as a staff reader for Columbia Pictures and CBS Television (1956-1959) writing synopses and reader's reports for books considered as potential movie concepts. During this time, he experimented in multiple literary genres, producing a collection of short fiction, plays, and television scripts; however, it was his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), that proved most successful. Welcome to Hard Times was the product of his experience at Columbia Pictures, as he later told an interviewer: "I had to suffer one lousy western after another, and it occurred to me that I could lie about the West in a much more interesting way than any of these people were lying." Welcome to Hard Times was itself later adapted into a movie starring Henry Fonda.

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