E.L. Doctorow

American · 1931 to 2015

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born on January 6, 1931, in the Bronx, New York City, and grew up in a family that prized books over most other things. He graduated from Kenyon College in Ohio in 1952, where he studied philosophy under the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, then did graduate work in English drama at Columbia University before entering the Army. He served as a corporal in the United States Army Signal Corps in West Germany, and married Helen Esther Setzer there in 1954; the marriage lasted the rest of his life and produced three children. Back in New York, he took a job reading scripts for a film company, summarizing so many mediocre Westerns for executives who never watched them that he decided, out of sheer irritation, that he could write a better one himself. The result, in 1960, was his debut novel, Welcome to Hard Times. He spent the following decade as a book editor, nine years in all, including a stretch as editor-in-chief of The Dial Press, where he published James Baldwin and Norman Mailer among others, before leaving publishing to write full time. The Book of Daniel, his fictionalized retelling of the Rosenberg spy case, appeared in 1971 and put him, in the words of one critic, into the first rank of American writers. Ragtime followed in 1975, weaving Coalhouse Walker Jr., Evelyn Nesbit, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Ford into a single documentary-styled portrait of turn-of-the-century America, and remains the book most readers know him by. He went on to write Billy Bathgate, World's Fair, The Waterworks, The March, and Homer & Langley, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award three times, the PEN/Faulkner Award twice, and the National Humanities Medal in 1998. For decades he also taught, at Sarah Lawrence, Yale, Utah, UC Irvine, Princeton, and finally as the Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. He died of lung cancer in Manhattan on July 21, 2015, at eighty-four.