E. L. Doctorow

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E. L. (Edgar Laurence) Doctorow (b. 1931–d. 2015) is a well-established American writer of twelve novels, three collections of short stories, one play, several screenplays, and numerous essays and miscellaneous items. A native of New York City and a descendent of Russian Jewish immigrants, Doctorow grew up in the Bronx. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, he studied philosophy at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he was influenced by John Crowe Ransom and the New Critics, and then began graduate work in playwriting at Columbia University. When the military draft interrupted his graduate work in 1953, Doctorow served two years with the US Army Signal Corps in Germany. In 1954 he married Helen Setzer, also a writer, with whom he had three children. After leaving the military in 1955, Doctorow returned to New York, where he worked at various jobs. His time as a script reader at Columbia Pictures, as a senior editor for the New American Library, and as editor-in-chief, vice president, and publisher at Dial Press led to his writing fiction full time. By 1969 Doctorow had published two novels, one of which had been made into a movie, and was a writer-in-residence at the University of California at Irvine. Over the course of his career, he also held writer-in-residence or teaching positions at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Drama, the University of Utah, and Princeton University. In 1982 he became the Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. With the publication of The Book of Daniel, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1972, and Ragtime, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, Doctorow was established as a major American writer and best-selling author. His works, which appeared in such forums as the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Atlantic, Paris Review, and Gentleman’s Quarterly, continued to receive accolades. World’s Fair received the National Book Award in 1986, Billy Bathgate the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1990, and The March the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2006. Doctorow was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Dean Howells Medal, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, a Chicago Tribune Literary Award, a National Humanities Medal, and a PEN/Saul Bellow Award, among others. Doctorow is well known for his structural innovation; his political, social, and historical concerns; his blurring of the boundaries between fiction and fact; and his treatment of such themes as family relationships, the horrors of war, identity, alienation, sexuality, history, justice, societal institutions, the American past, human consciousness, epistemological uncertainty, and the evils of corruption.