In the latter half of his career, Doctorow was most often identified as the author of the novel, Ragtime, a surprise bestseller in 1975. Besides all that, Doctorow simply wrote like a dream, no matter what fictional voice he chose to adopt. He explored the no-man’s land between modernist and post-modern fiction writing in ways that the two contemporaries with whom he can most plausibly be grouped, John Updike and Philip Roth, seldom did. His fiction was enriched by a fascination with popular culture, yet, literarily, he had a strong experimental streak. Doctorow was a novelist of coming-of-age in twentieth century America, one of the US’s few genuinely political novelists, and an historical novelist of great accomplishment. In later years, he taught writing at NYU and also did some screenwriting, besides, of course, his career as essayist and fiction writer. A child of the Depression, he studied with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in the 1950s and was editor for Norman Mailer and James Baldwin in the 1960s. Since John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy, no American writer has sought to encompass the variousness of the national experience in quite the way E.L (Edgar) Doctorow did.
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