In 16 essays adapted from reviews, book introductions and public lectures, Doctorow explores the theme of literary and scientific creation, considering how creators shape, and are shaped by, the culture that surrounds them. Most of the essays focus on American writers: Doctorow incisively considers the "American consciousness" of Edgar Allan Poe, laments the paradoxical racism of Uncle Tom's Cabin
, revels in the Shakespearean riffs of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
and pinpoints the "conflicting visions of the same past" in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn
. Doctorow usefully contrasts Ernest Hemingway's distinctly American treatment of the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls
with that of his French contemporary André Malraux, and he commends Arthur Miller's moral seriousness. Ranging outside of literature, Doctorow praises the comic genius of his childhood idol, Harpo Marx, tracing his anarchic clowning to a childhood of poverty spent outwitting the urban forces arrayed against him. He examines soberly the national and institutional climate in which the atom bomb's creators were immersed: the bomb's "components were either uranium isotopes or plutonium... and a dread of the malignant war-machined sociopathy of Adolf Hitler." Brilliantly written, Doctorow's cultural and literary analysis abounds in acute literary characterizations and mordant observations. (Sept. 19)
