E. L. Doctorow

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was an American novelist, editor, and professor, born on January 6, 1931, in the Bronx and active across the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Best known for historical fiction, he wrote twelve novels, three volumes of short fiction, and a stage drama. His books often placed invented characters inside recognizable historical settings, alongside known public figures, and he moved freely among narrative styles. At the time of his death on July 21, 2015, President Barack Obama called him “one of America’s greatest novelists.”

Doctorow was 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. He attended city public grade schools and the Bronx High School of Science, where, surrounded by mathematically gifted classmates, he found refuge in the office of the school literary magazine, Dynamo, which published his first literary effort. He later said he had been “a child who read everything I could get my hands on,” and that he came to ask not only what happened next in a story, but how words on a page made life happen.

After Bronx Science, Doctorow studied at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he worked with John Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions, and majored in philosophy. He graduated with honors in 1952, completed a year of graduate work in English drama at Columbia University, and was then 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. In 1954, while serving there, he married Helen Esther Setzer, a fellow Columbia student. They had three children.

Back in New York, Doctorow worked as a reader for a motion picture company. Reading many Westerns helped lead to his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, published in 1960 to positive reviews. To support his family, he then spent nine years as a book editor, first at New American Library, where he worked with writers including Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand. From 1964 to 1969 he was editor in chief of The Dial Press, publishing writers such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines, and William Kennedy. He left publishing in 1971 to write The Book of Daniel, a freely fictionalized consideration of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during the Cold War.

Doctorow’s best-known novels include Ragtime (1975), World’s Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005). Ragtime was later named one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library editorial board. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award three times, for Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March, and was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. Several works were adapted for film, including Welcome to Hard Times, Daniel, Billy Bathgate, Jolene, and Wakefield. The best-known adaptations were the 1981 film Ragtime and the 1998 Broadway musical of the same name, which won four Tony Awards.

Doctorow taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Drama, the University of Utah, the University of California, Irvine, Princeton University, and New York University, where he was the Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters. He rejected the label of political novelist, arguing that the language of politics did not fit the complexity of fiction, and he saw labels themselves as a distraction. His work remains worth reading because it treats the past as alive, difficult to reach, and still bound up with daily life. In his fiction, history is not a backdrop. It is pressure, memory, argument, and story.