E. L. Doctorow in The New Yorker
Edgar Lawrence, in 2014. He was better known as E. L. Doctorow was an American author best known internationally for his works of historical fiction. He has won awards like the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ragtime in 1975, National Book Award for World’s Fair in 1986, National Book Critics Circle Award for Billy […]
Edgar Lawrence, in 2014. He was better known as E. L. Doctorow was an American author best known internationally for his works of historical fiction. He has won awards like the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ragtime in 1975, National Book Award for World’s Fair in 1986, National Book Critics Circle Award for Billy Bathgate in 1989, Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction and many more.
E. L. Doctorow died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 84. Widely celebrated for his often formally adventurous historical novels – ‘The Book of Daniel,’ ‘Ragtime,’ ‘Billy Bathgate,’ and ‘The March,’ among others – he received, over the course of his career, nearly every major award available to an American writer of fiction, some of them more than once.
He also, during the last 20 years, published many pieces in The New Yorker. “New York is home for my imagination – which is convenient, since I live here,” Doctorow said in 1994, in a talk of the Town story. He had just written ‘The Waterworks,’ a novel set in New York City in 1871. “When you write about the past,” he said, “you are always reflecting your own age.”
In 1995, Doctorow was one of five writers in the magazine who reflected on ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ a book in which, in Doctorow’s words, “Civilisation is a vicious confidence game played on a field of provincial ignorance.” Three years later, Doctorow wrote a comment for the magazine about Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, an inquiry that brought to mind, for Doctorow, both Joseph McCarthy and the Salem witch trials.
In between those two pieces, he published ‘Heist,’ the first of his short stories to appear in The New Yorker. It was followed by seven others: ‘A House on the Plains,’ ‘Baby Wilson,’ ‘Jolene: A Life,’ ‘Walter John Harmon,’ ‘Wakefield,’ ‘Edgemont Drive,’ and ‘Assimilation.’
After each of those last two stories appeared, Doctorow exchanged e-mails with the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, about the inspirations for the stories and the decisions he made while writing and revising them. Asked about how he captured the many voices in ‘Assimilation,’ he explained: “You just listen and write down what you hear.” In 2008, he was a guest on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, on which he read and discussed John O’Hara’s ‘Graven Image.’
When John Updike died in 2009, Doctorow remembered a letter that his fellow writer – who had complaints about Doctorow’s earlier novels, but who wrote, in a review for this magazine, that ‘The March’ “pretty much cures my Doctorow problem”- had sent him a couple of years before. Doctorow shared part of that letter on this Web site. Updike had just received a prestigious award, but when Doctorow congratulated him on it, Updike said that he thought mostly of the writers who “can do things I can’t.”
“The self-doubt of this prodigious talent moved the hell out of me,” Doctorow wrote. “On the other hand it’s a good indication of the engine that drives us all, isn’t it?”
Source: The New Yorker