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.

From 1959-1964, Doctorow served as senior editor for the New American Library, and from 1964-1969 as the editor in chief of Dial Press, where he worked with Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and others. He left to finish his third novel, The Book of Daniel (1971), which won critical acclaim and a nomination for a National Book Award. The Book of Daniel is a fictionalized account of the Rosenberg children whose lives are haunted by the Atom Spy Trials of their parents and by the general paranoia introduced into American culture during the McCarthy-era. It was adapted into a movie in 1983 directed by Sidney Lumet.

After 1969, Doctorow devoted his time to writing and teaching. He was associated with several colleges and universities, including the University of California, Irvine; Sarah Lawrence College; Yale University Drama School; and Princeton University; however, he made his permanent home at New York University where he held the Glucksman Chair in American Letters. He was also a member of P.E.N American Center and was appointed as a member to the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984.

Ragtime (1975), written while Doctorow was a Guggenheim fellow and a Creative Artists Service fellow, started as one of the most highly anticipated and critically acclaimed novels of 1976 and ended by being one of the fastest selling and most popular books of all time. It interweaves historical personalities within a fictional narrative in order to expose the nascent lurking of a more ominous political and cultural threat that is always central to Doctorow's general critique of American life. This technique of commingling fact and fiction was sometimes interpreted as a departure from reality; yet Doctorow was always quick to defend the novelist's right to imagination: "What's real and what isn't? I used to know but I've forgotten. Let's just say that Ragtime is a mingling of fact and invention—a novelist's revenge on an age that celebrates nonfiction." Ragtime received the first National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1976 as well as the Arts and Letters Award given by the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters. It was adapted into a movie directed by Milos Forman in 1981 and into a Broadway musical in 1996.

Doctorow's subsequent novels would further refine his unique depiction of the history of New York City and the United States as a whole. Loon Lake (1980) is the story of a young man who cast adrift during the Depression years; World's Fair (1986) is a memoir of a 1930s New York City boyhood; and Billy Bathgate (1989) explores the underground of gangsterism and crime. Loon Lake was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and was nominated for the National Book Award; World's Fair was the winner of the 1986 National Book Award; Billy Bathgate was the winner of the 1990 P.E.N./Faulkner Award and was adapted into a movie by Tom Stoppard directed by Robert Benton. These books were followed by The Waterworks (1994), an 1870s Manhattan mystery, and City of God (2000), a spiritual quest set at the turn of the 20th Century, and The March (2005), a fictionalized depiction of Sherman's March to the Sea. The latter won the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award, the 2005 National Book Critics Award, and was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize and the 2005 National Book Award.

Doctorow's other works include a play, Drinks Before Dinner (1979), first produced by Joseph Papp under the direction of Mike Nichols, and three works of short fiction, Lives of the Poets (1984), Sweet Land Stories (2004), and All the Time in the World (2011). His final novel, Andrew's Brain (2014), confronts how the nature of human cognition inhibits the search for truth. Additionally, Doctorow wrote a number of non-fiction pieces for various periodicals, including The New York Times, The Nation, Newsday, Playboy, Harper's, and The New Yorker. In 1993, he published a collection of these pieces in Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution. He continued to write until his death of lung cancer in 2015 at age 84.