![]() ![]() Doctorow’s Ragtime is, appropriately, a quotation from Scott Joplin: “Do not play this piece fast. “I’m willing to participate in all of them, as long as none claims to be an exhaustive staff writers David Ulin and Ryan Parker contributed to this report.The epigraph for E. “I accept any kind of identity,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. Still others labeled him a Jewish novelist. Others saw him as mainly a political writer. Some observers wanted to put him in a box with historical novelists. He was often asked what kind of novelist he was. “So to be irreverent to myth, to play with it, let in some light and air, to try to combust it back into history, is to risk being seen as someone who distorts truth.” But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth,” he told Paris Review in 1986. That’s why every generation writes it anew. The interplay of history and imagination drove much of Doctorow’s work, but his was a perilous undertaking. Doctorow “turns history into myth and myth into history,” Raymond Sokolov wrote in a review for the Washington Post. ![]() Of the latter, the main figure is Coalhouse Walker Jr., a black musician victimized by racism. “Ragtime” (1975) takes place in New York during the Gilded Age, offering a fabric of real and fictional characters. New Republic critic Stanley Kauffmann proclaimed it “the political novel of our age, the best American work of its kind that I know since Lionel Trilling’s ‘The Middle of the Journey.’” Jane Richmond in Partisan Review called it “a book of infinite detail and tender attention to the edges of life as well as to its dead center.” And I realized that the Rosenbergs could be the fulcrum. “It occurred to me that I could tell the story of this country’s life over a 30-year period by dealing with its dissidents. “Out of the campuses came something called the New Left, and I began to wonder how it compared with the old left of the ‘30s,” he told the Guardian. ![]() He sought to write about an explosive time, when suspected Communists were being exposed and, in many cases, prosecuted, or worse, put to death, as the Rosenbergs were. While struggling with how to tell the story, he accepted a post at UC Irvine, in 1968, that turned out to be a propitious move. His third novel, “The Book of Daniel” (1971), trod deeply into one of the most contested episodes in American history. He later disavowed the novel as the worst book he ever wrote. He continued to play with literary traditions in his next novel, “Big As Life,” his satirical sci-fi tale involving naked human giants in New York harbor. Noting the agility with which the young author grappled with a philosophical quandary involving man and evil, the New York Times praised the novel as “taut and dramatic, exciting and successfully symbolic.” After completing his military service, he went to work as a script reader at Columbia Pictures, where he was forced to appraise “one lousy Western after another,” as he told the Miami Herald in 1975.Ĭonvinced he could do a better job, he wrote a short story that became the first chapter of “Welcome to Hard Times,” a Western parody in which, he told the Los Angeles Times in 2006, “the bad guy just wipes out this town.” Later, he would revisit these themes in such works as “Billy Bathgate,” a Faulknerian portrait of gangster Dutch Schultz through the eyes of a Depression-era Bronx street urchin that won a PEN/Faulkner Award and a William Dean Howells Medal and “The March” (2005), a re-imagining of Sherman’s march as a homegrown Grand Guignol, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for fiction as well as the Pen/Faulkner.Īlong with his wife and son Richard, he is survived by daughters Jenny and Caroline and four grandchildren.ĭoctorow wrote plays while serving in the Army. “The Book of Daniel” (1971), which fictionalized the Rosenberg atomic espionage case through the eyes of the children they had left behind, moved back and forth from the Red Scare to the divisions of the 1960s, representing in many ways a coming-of-age story for the culture at large. “Ragtime” (1975) was Doctorow’s breakthrough, but it was not his first great book. His first novel, “Welcome to Hard Times” (1960), was intended to subvert the conventions of the Western genre, while his second, “Big as Life” (1966), brought the same approach to science fiction. This explains his range, both in terms of subject and sensibility. ![]()
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