Doctorow, E(dgar) L(awrence)

(US, 1931– )

Doctorow has lived in New York for most of his life. Although he published two novels in the 1960s, it was The Book of Daniel (1971) which won him widespread critical acclaim. This difficult but rewarding novel retells the story of the Rosenbergs, who were executed in 1953 for allegedly passing information about nuclear weapons to the Russians. History needs to be rewritten, Doctorow once said, or it becomes mythology and then it can be used destructively. Like his distinctive take on the 1930s in Loon Lake (1980), or the 1870s in The Waterworks (1994), his second novel, Ragtime (1975), brings this principle into motion. Set largely in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century, this accessible and funny novel playfully imagines Freud, Houdini, Henry Ford, and the anarchist Emma Goldman rubbing shoulders.

Robert Coover, Robert Stone, Don DeLillo. See HISTORICAL, WESTERN  BH