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Authors E. L. Doctorow

Mark Sobzcak

No American novelist of the twentieth century has done more than Doctorow—now in his seventy-fifth year and the author of nine novels in addition to short stories, critical essays, screenplays, and a play—to enliven the historical novel, already by the 1930s a musty sideline in American literature.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Christopher Benfey New York Review of Books 2005
Like any other idealistic and perceptive person, Doctorow has a complaint about history, that it contained brutality and villainy. The indignation which breaks through the lyricism or funny bits in all his work suggests despair about human nature itself (and why not?), but also a demand for some sort of apology…

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Diane Johnson New York Review of Books 1980

Doctorow is a stranger writer than he at first seems; his fiction, though generous with the conventional pleasures of dramatic plot, colorful characters, and information-rich prose, yet challenges the reader with a puckish truculence

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New Yorker John Updike New Yorker 2005

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Whether personal or political, all attitudes, stands, positions in the Kunderian vision come up short. He will kill off three of his quartet and allow the fourth to disappear from the book, presumably from a lightness of being; but his true story, the one to which he gives honest service, is the operation of his own mind as it formulates and finds images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime.

Read the full piece at New York Times E. L. Doctorow New York Times 1998
Ragtime

[…] I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. […] It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Broadview Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in the summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was President.

Read the full piece at The Paris Review E. L. Doctorow The Paris Review 1986
Ernest Hemingway

He applied the same strategies to every book, strategies as it happens that he came upon and invented quite early on in his career. They were his triumph in the early days. But by the last decade or two of his working life they trapped him, restricted him, and defeated him.

Read the full piece at The Paris Review E. L. Doctorow The Paris Review 1986