From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
E. L. Doctorow |
E.L. Doctorow, (photograph by Mark Sobczak) |
| Born |
January 6, 1931 (age 79)
Bronx, New
York |
|
Occupation |
writer, editor, professor |
|
Nationality |
American |
| Alma mater |
Kenyon College, Columbia
University |
| Period |
1960 - present |
| Notablework(s) |
The Book of Daniel, Ragtime,World's
Fair, Billy
Bathgate, The
March, Homer
& Langley |
|
Spouse(s) |
Helen Setzer |
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (born
January 6, 1931, New
York, New York) is an American author.
[edit]Biography
Edgar Lawrence ("E.L.") Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New
York City, the son of second-generation Americans of
Russian Jewish descent.
He attended city public grade schools and the Bronx
High School of Science where,
surrounded by mathematically gifted
children, he fled to the office of the school literary magazine, Dynamo,
where he published his first literary effort, The Beetle, which he
describes as ”a tale of etymological self-defamation inspired by my reading of Kafka.”
Doctorow attended Kenyon
College, where he studied with the poet and New
Critic, John
Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions and majored in Philosophy.
After graduating with Honors in 1952 he did a year of graduate work in English
Drama at Columbia
University before being drafted
into the army.
He served with the Army of Occupation in Germany in
1954-55 as a corporal in
the signal
corps.
He returned to New
York after his military service
and took a job as a reader for a motion picture company where he said he had
to read so many Westerns that
he was inspired to write what became his first novel, Welcome
to Hard Times. He began the work as a parody of
the Western genre, but the piece evolved into a novel that asserted itself as
a serious reclamation of the genre before
he was through. It was published to positive reviews in 1960.
Doctorow had married a fellow Columbia drama
student, Helen Setzer, while in
Germany and by the time he had
moved on from his reader’s job in 1960 to become an
editor at the New
American Library, (NAL) a mass market paperback publisher,
he was the father of three children. To support his family he would spend nine
years as a
book editor, first at NAL working with such authors as Ian
Fleming and Ayn
Rand, and then, in 1964 as Editor-in-chief at The
Dial Press, publishing work by James
Baldwin,
Norman Mailer, Ernest
J. Gaines and William
Kennedy, among others.
In 1969 Doctorow left publishing in order to write, and accepted a position as
Visiting Writer at the University
of California, Irvine, where he completed The
Book of Daniel, a freely fictionalized consideration of the trial and
execution of Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg for
allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet
Union during the Cold
War. Published in 1971 it was widely acclaimed, called a “masterpiece” by The
Guardian, and it launched Doctorow into "the first rank of American
writers" according to the New
York Times.[1]
Doctorow’s next book, written in his home in New
Rochelle, New York, was Ragtime(1975),
since accounted one of the hundred best
novels of the 20th century by
theModern
Library Editorial Board.[2]
Doctorow’s subsequent work includes the award winning novels World's
Fair (1985),Billy
Bathgate (1989) and The
March (2005); two volumes
of short fiction, Lives
of the Poets I (1984) and Sweetland
Stories (2004); and two
volumes of selected essays,Jack
London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993)
and Creationists (2006).
He is published in over thirty languages.
He has taught at Sarah
Lawrence College, the Yale
School of Drama, the University
of Utah and Princeton
University. He is currently Loretta and Lewis
Glucksman Professor of English
and American Letters at New
York University.
Doctorow has donated his papers to the Fales
Library of New York University. He is the recipient of the National
Humanities Medal conferred at
the White
House in 1998.[3]
