E.L. Doctorow, the American author best known for such novels as Ragtime and The March, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.
Born in the Bronx in 1931, Edgar Lawrence, as he was formally named, received a B.A. from Kenyon College and did postgraduate work at Columbia University before spending two years in the army. After the army, he worked as a staff reader for Columbia Pictures, later taking a job as a senior editor at New American Library. Doctorow joined Random House, which would go on to become his longtime publisher, as an editor at Dial Press. He became editor-in-chief of Dial in 1964 and worked with Norman Mailer and James Baldwin, among others.
Doctorow published his own first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, in 1960. The author of 12 novels, in addition to collections of short fiction and essays, Doctorow won a collection of major literary awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (three times), the PEN Faulkner (twice) and the Gold Medal or Fiction (awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters).
In a statement from Random House, his editor, Kate Medina, said Doctorow's work "has always been ascendant, always steeped in the new, with original language, surprising storytelling, rigorous thought and standards of truth." She went on: "Edgar was fun, even as he was holding all of us to the high standards he set for himself. To be with him was to be at one’s best; to read him was to discover, again and again, the joy of reading a master.” Or, as one of his contemporaries, Don DeLillo, summarized: "Doctorow’s great topic is the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.”
Here, a collection of reviews of Doctorow's books:
Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006
Lamentation: 9/11 text by E. L. Doctorow, photography by David Finn, and preface by Kofi A. Annan
Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992
