And I realized that the Rosenbergs could be the fulcrum. It occurred to me that I could tell the story of this country's life over a 30-year period by dealing with its dissidents. In an interview, he explained how his interest was piqued: "Out of the.campuses came something called the new left, and I began to wonder how it compared with the old left of the 30s. RIP, Doctorow.The Book of Daniel was published in 1971 when Doctorow was a Visiting Author at the University of California, Irvine.ĭoctorow conceived of the idea for the novel in the late 1960s - an era of intense conflicts over Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and social change. The writer is survived by his wife, son, two daughters, and four grandchildren. In memoriam, here’s a clip of Doctorow speaking at the New York State Writers Institute last year: His books taught me much, and he will be missed.- President Obama July 22, 2015 Doctorow was one of America's greatest novelists.
President Obama was among those grieving fiction’s great loss Tuesday evening:Į.L. Over the course of a leggy career that spanned nearly six decades, Doctorow nabbed a National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, the PEN Saul Bellow Award, a National Humanities Medal, and the Gold Medal for Fiction (awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters), among many others. After studying at Kenyon College with the poet John Crowe Ransom, Doctorow completed a year of graduate work at Columbia, was drafted to the Army during the Allied occupation, and worked a slew of odd jobs (including stints at an airport, as a script reader, and as a book editor), before making his first big break with 1960’s Welcome to Hard Times. As dogged as Shackleton striding across Antarctica, my friends and I trekked the neighborhoods looking for the best snow street, and when we found it we took off with no further ceremony, running all out, our Flexible Flyers held aloft and, attaining launch speed, we threw ourselves and our sleds through the air and bellywhopped our way down the snow-packed avenue, the sticking snow flying into our grins and all the powers of life humming in our skinny little heart-pumping bodies.ĭoctorow was born (Edgar Lawrence, reportedly after Edgar Allan Poe) and raised in the Bronx, where he learned and studied the power of fiction at an early age. … Winter was finally the time of such exertion as to constitute a triumph over nameless cold evil. It was our stickball field, our flea market. Nobody in the neighborhood owned a car, and so the street belonged to the kids. When he recalled his Bronx upbringing for New York in 2013, he painted a vivid portrait of Great Depression–era youth and rebellious joie de vivre in the city: He also occasionally wrote for such publications as The New York Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Times, and New York (some of those writings are available, archived here). His most recent release was last year’s Andrew’s Brain. Several of his books were adapted as big-screen projects, including Welcome to Hard Times, Billy Bathgate, and Ragtime - the last of which also saw the stage and garnered four Tonys. The New York Times reports the cause was “complications from lung cancer.” He was 84.ĭoctorow, often looked at as one of the doyens of historical fiction, wrote 12 novels as well as a handful of short-story collections and a play. Doctorow, the award-winning New York author who was renowned for his historical fiction and penned such unique works as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, City of God, and The Waterworks, died Tuesday in Manhattan.
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