E. L. Doctorow

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (born January 6, 1931, New York, New York) is an American author.

Biography

Edgar Lawrence ("E.L.") Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent. He attended city public grade schools and the Bronx High School of Science where, surrounded by mathematically gifted children, he fled to the office of the school literary magazine, Dynamo, where he published his first literary effort, The Beetle, which he describes as ”a tale of etymological self-defamation inspired by my reading of Kafka.”

Doctorow attended Kenyon College, where he studied with the poet and New Critic, John Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions and majored in Philosophy. After graduating with Honors in 1952 he did a year of graduate work in English Drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the army. He served with the Army of Occupation in Germany in 1954-55 as a corporal in the signal corps.

He returned to New York after his military service and took a job as a reader for a motion picture company where he said he had to read so many Westerns that he was inspired to write what became his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. He began the work as a parody of the Western genre, but the piece evolved into a novel that asserted itself as a serious reclamation of the genre before he was through. It was published to positive reviews in 1960.

Doctorow had married a fellow Columbia drama student, Helen Setzer, while in Germany and by the time he had moved on from his reader’s job in 1960 to become an editor at the New American Library, (NAL) a mass market paperback publisher, he was the father of three children. To support his family he would spend nine years as a book editor, first at NAL working with such authors as Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand, and then, in 1964 as Editor-in-chief at The Dial Press, publishing work by James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines and William Kennedy, among others.

In 1969 Doctorow left publishing in order to write, and accepted a position as Visiting Writer at the University of California, Irvine, where he completed The Book of Daniel, a freely fictionalized consideration of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Published in 1971 it was widely acclaimed, called a “masterpiece” by The Guardian, and it launched Doctorow into "the first rank of American writers" according to the New York Times.

Doctorow’s next book, written in his home in New Rochelle, New York, was Ragtime (1975), since accounted one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library Editorial Board.

Doctorow’s subsequent work includes the award winning novels World's Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989) and The March (2005); two volumes of short fiction, Lives of the Poets I (1984) and Sweetland Stories (2004); and two volumes of selected essays, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993) and Creationists (2006). He is published in over thirty languages.

He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Drama, the University of Utah and Princeton University. He is currently Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.

Doctorow has donated his papers to the Fales Library of New York University. He is the recipient of the National Humanities Medal conferred at the White House in 1998.

Works

(1960) Welcome to Hard Times
(1966) Big As Life
(1968) The Songs of Billy Bathgate. [http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/30/bookend/bookend.html?_r=1&oref=slogin] Short story; chronicling the career of a folk-rock musician, the tale is told in the form of liner notes. Doctorow would later recycle the protagonists' name for his PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel Billy Bathgate. In an interview published in a compendium of critical analysis of his work, Doctorow claimed that he'd been questioned as to whether or not the protagonist of "Songs" was the son of the protagonist from Billy Bathgate, since the dates of birth given for the protagonists's son in Billy Bathgate correlate to the age of the protagonist from Songs. Doctorow states that, while he had not intended it as such, he has no objection to this view of the characters' lineage. This short story is also mentioned in the song "Sad, Sad, Sad (and Far Away from Home)" by Peter Mulvey.
(1971) The Book of Daniel. Nominated for a National Book Award, it fictionalized the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.
(1975) Ragtime Received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; it was adapted for the 1981 film Ragtime (nominated for eight Academy Awards) and again for the Broadway musical Ragtime in 1998 (nominated for twelve Tony Awards).
(1979) Drinks Before Dinner (play)
(1980) Loon Lake (novel). Nominated for National Book Award for Fiction in Paperback.
(1982) American Anthem (A photographic essay)
(1984) Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella
(1985) World's Fair. Received the 1986 National Book Award.
(1989) Billy Bathgate. Won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and received the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the best novel of the previous five-year period.
(1994) The Waterworks
(2000) City of God
(2003) Reporting the Universe[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/DOCREP.html], Harvard University Press
(2004) Sweet Land Stories. A New York Times Notable Book.
(2005) The March, ISBN 0-375-50671-3 Awarded the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. Also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and nominated for the National Book Award.
(2006) Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006 (Random House, 178 pages)
(2008) [http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/01/14/080114fi_fiction_doctorow?printable=true Wakefield (short story) New Yorker 14 Jan. 2008]
(2009) All The Time in the World (short story) Kenyon Review Vol. 31 no. 1
(2009) Homer and Langley

Translation

The phrase "E. L. Doctorow" occurs as such in the following languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Finnish.

Translation(s) in other languages: Bulgarian: Едгар Лорънс Доктороу, Czech: Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, Persian: ادگار لورنس دکتروف, Hindi: ई एल डाक्टारो, Hungarian: Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, Russian: Доктороу, Эдгар Лоуренс, Swedish: Edgar Lawrence Doctorow.