#Doctorow novel free#
Edgar was allowed free access to his father’s extensive collection of 78 rpm albums. Love of music was the glue that held the family together. His father, David, owned a music shop in midtown Manhattan, only for it to go broke in 1940. Living in a flat on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx, north of Manhattan, and with a well-to-do uncle and aunt in the suburb of Pelham Manor in Westchester County, he had a glimpse of a benevolent, calm life, contrasting sharply with the family life of the Doctorows in the Depression, which seemed both quarrelsome and stressful. Doctorow told in many interviews the story that he was named after Edgar Allan Poe, supposedly his father’s favourite writer. Everyone in the family read, but they were poor, and books mainly came from the library. His grandfather, a printer by trade, was a passionate reader of Tolstoy.
And that it was literature, “intuitive, metaphysical, mythic”, which takes us to the heart of the social reality of American life.ĭoctorow grew up in New York city, the grandson of Jewish immigrants who arrived from present-day Belarus in the 1880s.
Doctorow felt that history was, in the end, literature. In 1994 Schama wrote a notably sympathetic review of Doctorow’s The Waterworks. Fantasy, as such, must be clearly labelled, even for our few remaining voluntary readers.”Īustere scholars similarly deplored Simon Schama’s use of novelistic devices in Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), his playful 1991 exploration of the possibilities of “historical novellas”. “It is hardly wise, in what looks to be a factual account, to have Harry Houdini chat with Walt Whitman aboard the Titanic, or whatever.
#Doctorow novel professional#
But at heart he sided with the professional historians against writers such as Doctorow, doubting the wisdom of playing fast and loose with the facts. Vidal accepted no corrections from the professors. Long lists were compiled of his scholarly misapprehensions. Gore Vidal received heavyweight attacks from the leading Abraham Lincoln scholars when he published Lincoln in 1984. (He may not have been fully serious on this point.) Doctorow was attracted by the idea of improving upon the historical record. Doctorow claimed that his portrait of the financier JP Morgan in Ragtime was largely based upon deep study of an Edward Steichen photograph of the formidable money man. The titillating scene in Ragtime, his international bestseller of 1975, between the anarchist Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White’s squeeze, was wildly out of character for Goldman, as her two-volume autobiography Living My Life made abundantly clear. So when it’s all done it’s all autobiographical and none of it is.”Ī poster for the film Ragtime, 1981, based on EL Doctorow’s 1975 book. And the act of composition has no regard where the material comes from. “Every book is an act of composition,” he remarked in 1989, “and if you happen to use memories or materials from your own mind, they are like any other resource they have to be composed. “My premise is that the language of politics can’t accommodate the complexity of fiction, which as a mode of thought is intuitive, metaphysical, mythic.” Although he wrote lovingly of the lost world of the Jewish Bronx in the 1930s, where he grew up, he rejected the idea that he was an autobiographical writer. He did not want to be called a political novelist. He lived contentedly within the paradoxes of his career.
In a career spanning five decades, Doctorow feared that tidy labels were a distraction. He proved elusive when dealing with the pigeonholes crafted by reviewers, and not a few readers. Anointed “our pre-eminent lefty” among contemporary American novelists, EL Doctorow, who has died aged 84, was praised as the “epic poet” of the forgotten American left.
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