Doctorow, E(dgar) L(awrence)

Doctorow, E[dgar] L[awrence] (1931– ),New York City‐born novelist, graduate of Kenyon College, editor in publishing firms, and faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College (1971–78) and NYU (1982– ). His first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), depicted the devastation of a Dakota frontier town by an evil outsider. More than a decade later it was followed by The Book of Daniel (1971), the fictive biography of a boy recalling his parents, who, like their models, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were executed for providing secret information to an enemy nation. He won great popularity and a National Book Critics Circle Award with Ragtime (1975), a jazzily written view of early‐20th‐century America that fuses tales of fictional characters and such real people as Henry Ford, Scott Joplin, Emma Goldman, and J.P. Morgan. Loon Lake (1980) is a picaresque novel about a Midwestern American's experiences in the 1930s and post‐World War II U.S. Drinks Before Dinner (1979) is a play marked more by the conversation and ideas of one character than by action. He returned to the novel with World's Fair (1985), a tale of a Bronx boy growing to some maturity, and Billy Bathgate (1989), about another Bronx boy of the 1930s but one who drifts into the world of gangsters. Other works include the nonfictional Essays and Conversations (1983); Lives of the Poets (1984),stories and a related novella; and Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays 1977–1992 (1993). The Waterworks (1994), narrated by a newspaper editor who is marginal to the plot action, evokes New York City as it was in 1871; the plot concerns several never fully unravelled mysteries.