![]() ![]() He might write an open letter to then-President George H.W. … And this was entirely unplanned.”Ī balding man with a soft goatee and impish expression, Doctorow was little known to the general public before age 40, but by late middle age was not just a popular author but a kind of wise man and liberal conscience. “Someone pointed out to me a couple of years ago that you could line them up and in effect now with this book, 150 years of American history. “I don’t know what I set out to do,” Doctorow told the Associated Press in 2006. Mixing fictional characters with historical figures, he looked back to the Civil War (“The March”), the post-Civil War era (“The Waterworks”), the turn of the 20th Century (the million-selling “Ragtime”), the 1930s (“Billy Bathgate,” “Loon Lake,” “World’s Fair”) and the Cold War (“The Book of Daniel”). ![]() He forged his reputation around a series of novels - most set in and around New York City - that carried readers from the 1800s to modern times. His prizes included the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle award and both competitive and honorary National Book Awards. “This belief is akin to the scientist’s faith in the scientific method as a way to truth.”ĭoctorow was among the most honored authors of the past 40 years. “Underlying everything - the evocative flashes, the dogged working of language - is the writer’s belief in the story as a system of knowledge,” he wrote in the introduction to his essay collection “Creationists,” published in 2006. Student of political and literary history and how they tell us who we are now.ĭoctorow, who died Tuesday at age 84, was the rare American writer to move gracefully between lives as engaged citizen and solitary inventor. Commentator on wars and presidents and the laws of the land. Doctorow’s.Ĭonjurer of old-time gangsters and ragtime stars. NEW YORK – Few minds were as playful and as serious as E.L.
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