Wikipedia Deep Dive

E. L. Doctorow

13 min read

The Novelist Who Made History Come Alive

When Edgar Lawrence Doctorow died in 2015, President Barack Obama called him "one of America's greatest novelists." That's a remarkable tribute for any writer to receive, but what makes it even more striking is how Doctorow earned it: by writing books that most literary purists would have dismissed as impossible to pull off.

He put Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung on a roller coaster at Coney Island together. He had Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan meet in ways they never actually did. He took the real-life execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and wove fictional characters through their tragedy. And somehow, impossibly, it all worked.

This is the story of how a boy from the Bronx, named after Edgar Allan Poe by his Russian Jewish immigrant parents, became the master of a form he essentially invented: the kind of historical fiction where the line between what happened and what might have happened becomes gloriously, meaningfully blurred.

Fleeing from Math into Stories

Doctorow was born on January 6, 1931, in the Bronx, New York. His parents, Rose and David Doctorow, were second-generation Americans whose families had come from Russia. David ran a small music shop. They named their son Edgar Lawrence after Edgar Allan Poe—a choice that would prove prophetic, given that both Edgars would become famous for creating worlds that haunt the imagination.

Young Edgar attended the Bronx High School of Science, one of the most prestigious public schools in New York City, known for producing Nobel laureates and brilliant mathematicians. But here's the thing about being surrounded by mathematical geniuses when you're not one yourself: you find somewhere else to be.

Doctorow fled to the office of the school's literary magazine, called Dynamo. There, among fellow word-lovers rather than equation-solvers, he published his first literary work. He also enrolled in a journalism class—not because he wanted to become a journalist, but because it gave him more opportunities to write. Even as a teenager, he understood that writers need to write constantly, and they'll find any excuse to do it.

Philosophy, Theater, and the Army

For college, Doctorow headed to Kenyon College in Ohio, a small liberal arts school with an outsized literary reputation. There he studied with John Crowe Ransom, one of the most influential poet-critics of the twentieth century. But rather than majoring in English or creative writing, Doctorow chose philosophy.

This might seem like an odd choice for someone who would become a novelist, but philosophy teaches you to ask the questions that matter most: What is real? What can we know? How should we live? These are exactly the questions that would animate Doctorow's best fiction, which constantly probes the nature of history, memory, and truth.

He also acted in college theater productions, developing an ear for dialogue and a sense of how stories work in performance. After graduating with honors in 1952, he spent a year doing graduate work in English drama at Columbia University—until the United States Army had other plans.

The Korean War was underway, and Doctorow was drafted. From 1954 to 1955, he served as a corporal in the Signal Corps in West Germany. It was during this time that he married Helen Esther Setzer, a fellow Columbia student. They would have three children together and remain married for the rest of his life.

The Accidental Western Writer

After military service, Doctorow returned to New York and got a job as a reader for a motion picture company. His assignment was to evaluate screenplays and books that might be turned into films. Many of these were Westerns—stories of cowboys, outlaws, frontier towns, and the violent birth of the American West.

Doctorow read so many Westerns that he started to see the formula. The lone hero. The corrupt town. The showdown at high noon. He began writing what he thought would be a parody of the genre, a satire of all those clichéd conventions.

But something unexpected happened as he wrote. The parody transformed into something else entirely—a serious reclamation of the Western as a form capable of real literary depth. The result was his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, published in 1960.

The New York Times reviewer Wirt Williams called it "taut and dramatic, exciting and successfully symbolic." This was not a parody at all. It was a meditation on violence, civilization, and the fragility of human community dressed in the clothes of a frontier tale. Doctorow had discovered something important: genre fiction could be literature, if you took it seriously enough.

The Editor Who Kept Writing

One novel does not pay the bills, especially when you have a family. Doctorow spent the next nine years working as a book editor—first at New American Library, where he worked with authors including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond) and Ayn Rand, and then as editor-in-chief at Dial Press starting in 1964.

At Dial, Doctorow published some of the most important writers of his generation: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines, and William Kennedy among others. He was shaping American literature from behind the scenes, discovering and nurturing talent that would define the era.

During these editing years, he published a second novel, Big As Life, in 1966. He later considered it so flawed that he refused to allow it to be republished. It's a curious thing about artists—sometimes they know when something isn't right, even when others might disagree, and they'd rather pretend it never existed than have it represent them poorly.

When Doctorow talked about becoming a writer, he described it with beautiful simplicity: "I was a child who read everything I could get my hands on. Eventually, I asked of a story not only what was to happen next, but how is this done? How am I made to live from words on a page? And so I became a writer."

That question—how am I made to live from words on a page?—would drive his entire career.

The Rosenbergs and the Birth of a Method

In 1969, Doctorow made a leap of faith. He left his secure editing job to pursue writing full-time, accepting a position as Visiting Writer at the University of California, Irvine. There he completed the book that would establish his reputation: The Book of Daniel.

Published in 1971, The Book of Daniel takes on one of the most controversial events in American Cold War history: the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union and executed in 1953. The case divided the nation. Were they guilty? Were they scapegoats of anti-communist hysteria? Was their punishment proportionate or barbaric?

Rather than writing a straightforward account, Doctorow created a fictional family clearly based on the Rosenbergs and told the story through the eyes of their son. This allowed him to explore the emotional and psychological truth of the situation without being bound to the literal facts. He could ask: what would it feel like to be the child of parents executed as traitors? What does that do to a person?

The Guardian called it a "masterpiece." The New York Times said it launched Doctorow into "the first rank of American writers." He had found his method: using fiction to illuminate history in ways that straight nonfiction never could.

Ragtime: Where Everything Changed

If The Book of Daniel made Doctorow's reputation among literary critics, his next novel made him famous.

Ragtime, published in 1975, is set in the early twentieth century, during the era when that syncopated piano music gave the book its name. The novel follows three families—one wealthy white Protestant, one Jewish immigrant, one African American—whose lives intersect against the backdrop of a rapidly changing America.

But here's what made Ragtime revolutionary: Doctorow wove real historical figures into the narrative alongside his fictional characters. Harry Houdini, the escape artist, appears. So does the anarchist Emma Goldman. The financier J.P. Morgan. The automobile manufacturer Henry Ford. The psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The African American musician Scott Joplin.

In one memorable scene, Freud and Jung share a ride together at Coney Island's amusement park. Did this actually happen? No. Could it have happened, given that both men visited New York around that time? Absolutely. And that's the genius of Doctorow's approach. He wasn't falsifying history; he was playing in the gaps, imagining the meetings and moments that the historical record doesn't capture.

The Modern Library later named Ragtime one of the one hundred best novels of the twentieth century. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award—the first of three times Doctorow would win that honor, a feat matched by very few writers.

How He Made It Work

Doctorow's method required enormous research. To write about the early twentieth century, he had to understand how people talked, what they wore, what they worried about, what technologies were transforming their lives. To write about the Rosenberg era, he needed to grasp Cold War paranoia, the legal system, the mood of a nation gripped by fear of communist infiltration.

But here's the remarkable thing: you can't smell the research in his prose. Reviewer John Brooks noted that Doctorow's historical novels were "alive enough never to smell the research in old newspaper files that they must have required." The background work disappeared into the foreground of compelling storytelling.

Novelist Jay Parini described Doctorow's signature style as "a kind of detached but arresting presentation of history that mingled real characters with fictional ones." That detachment is important. Doctorow didn't write breathless prose or melodramatic scenes. His voice was calm, almost cool, which paradoxically made the events he described feel more real, more inevitable, more true.

As Parini wrote, Doctorow "demonstrated in most of his novels that the past is very much alive, but that it's not easily accessed. We tell and retell stories, and these stories illuminate our daily lives. He showed us again and again that our past is our present, and that those not willing to grapple with 'what happened' will be condemned to repeat its worst errors."

A Career of Continued Brilliance

After Ragtime, Doctorow continued producing major works for four more decades.

Loon Lake came in 1980, a Depression-era story about a young man who stumbles into the world of a wealthy industrialist. World's Fair followed in 1985, a more autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in the Bronx—Doctorow's own territory—that won the National Book Award.

Then came Billy Bathgate in 1989, the story of a Bronx teenager who becomes involved with the notorious gangster Dutch Schultz in the 1930s. The novel swept the awards: the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. It was later adapted into a film starring Dustin Hoffman.

The Waterworks arrived in 1994, a dark mystery set in post-Civil War Manhattan involving corruption, science gone wrong, and the lengths people will go to cheat death. City of God in 2000 experimented with form, mixing genres and styles in an exploration of faith and violence in the twentieth century.

In 2005, at age seventy-four, Doctorow published The March, about General William Tecumseh Sherman's famous—or infamous—march through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War. It won both the National Book Critics Circle Award (his third) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (his second). The book proved that Doctorow's powers remained undiminished in his eighth decade.

His final novels were Homer & Langley in 2009, a reimagining of the true story of the Collyer brothers, famous New York hoarders who became recluses, and Andrew's Brain in 2014, a philosophical novel about neuroscience, love, and identity.

The Teacher and the Legacy

Throughout his writing career, Doctorow also taught. He held positions at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Drama, the University of Utah, the University of California at Irvine, and Princeton University. For many years, he served as the Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.

In 2001, he donated his papers to New York University's Fales Library. The library's director, Marvin Taylor, called Doctorow "one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century."

The awards kept coming throughout his life. The National Humanities Medal in 1998. The PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2012. The Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2014, the year before he died. Induction into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. The American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction.

His work reached audiences beyond readers. Welcome to Hard Times became a 1967 film starring Henry Fonda. The Book of Daniel became the 1983 film Daniel with Timothy Hutton. Billy Bathgate reached screens in 1991 with Dustin Hoffman. Ragtime was adapted both as a 1981 film and, more successfully, as a 1998 Broadway musical that won four Tony Awards. Even after his death, adaptations continued—Wakefield, starring Bryan Cranston, came out in 2016.

The Final Chapter

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow died of lung cancer on July 21, 2015, at the age of eighty-four, in Manhattan. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, not far from where he grew up—the neighborhood that had shaped so many of his fictional worlds.

He left behind twelve novels, three volumes of short fiction, a play, numerous essays, and a body of work that fundamentally changed how we think about the relationship between fiction and history. Before Doctorow, putting real historical figures into invented situations felt like cheating, like a violation of some unwritten rule. After Doctorow, it became a recognized literary technique, a way of accessing truths that strict nonfiction couldn't reach.

The boy who fled from mathematicians to the literary magazine office, who read so many Westerns that he had to write his own, who asked the simple question "How am I made to live from words on a page?"—that boy grew into a writer who showed millions of readers how to live inside American history, to feel its weight and possibility, to understand that the past is never really past.

His parents named him after Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the uncanny and the strange. But Doctorow found his own kind of strangeness: the eerie feeling of encountering people you know from history books walking through scenes you know are invented, yet somehow believing in both. That's a magic trick worthy of his namesake, and one that will keep readers under its spell for generations to come.