E. L. Doctorow

E. L. Doctorow

It is ironic that Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was named after his father's favorite writer, Edgar Allen Poe. Both writers turned out to be groundbreaking experimental authors intent upon producing imminently readable and yet emotionally challenging literature. Both succeeded.

Born on January 6, 1931, in New York City, Doctorow attended the Bronx High School of Science before enrolling in Kenyon College, from which he was graduated with honors in 1952. He did post-graduate work at Columbia University before being drafted into the Army, where he was stationed in Germany.

In 1954, Doctorow married Helen Setzer. He went to work for Columbia Pictures, where he was a script reader from 1956 - 1959, after which he took a position as senior editor for New American Library, where he worked until 1964 before moving up to the position of editor-in-chief at Dial Press. Since leaving publishing in 1969, he has devoted his time to writing and teaching.

Doctorow holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University and has taught at several institutions, including Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California at Irvine.

Highly regarded and always controversial, he creates works that are marked by in-depth philosophical musings, subtly diverse prose, and placement of historical figures in sometimes unusual and often bizarre situations and settings. His novels stretch the limits of the literary genres on which he draws.

In his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), a Western, he fashions the materials of the Great Plains experience into an allegory of man and evil. His second novel, the sci-fi/thriller, Big as Life (1966), is a satire set in a futuristic New York.

With The Book of Daniel, his third novel, Doctorow solidified his position as a major American novelist. A fictional retelling of the notorious Rosenberg spy case, the story deftly evokes the complex anxieties of Cold War America, shuttling back and forth in time from the 1950s, when Paul and Roselle Isaacson are convicted of spying and electrocuted, to the late 1960s, when their troubled son, Daniel, a grad student at Columbia, must deal with the consequences of his unique birthright. The book was adapted into the 1983 film, Daniel, starring Timothy Hutton and directed by Sidney Lumet.

In 1975, Doctorow published Ragtime, a dazzling re-imagining of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century. The book was written while he was a Guggenheim fellow. In it, Doctorow relies on a plot that, as in City of God, mixes real-life figures—Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, William Howard Taft, Harry Houdini, and Sigmund Freud—with a bevy of fictional characters.

The book was a literary sensation and ultimately named one of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the editorial board of the Modern Library. It was adapted into a successful Broadway musical in 1998. Both it and the novel, Billy Bathgate (1989), which was nominated for a Pulitzer and won the PEN/Faulkner award, were adapted to the big screen.

Doctorow also wrote The Waterworks (1994), set in 1870s New York, and City of God (2000), a late 20th-century exploration of ideas and faith. He published a collection of essays, Reporting the Universe, in 2003 and another of short fiction entitled Sweet Land Stores in 2004.

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