A History of American Literature

576 The American Century: Literature since 1945

at least of the old America to which he has tried to return. But it is, he recognizes, a

heart that beats less fiercely in his own generation. And for most of the time, like so

many of Morris’s protagonists, he can only gaze at what he and America have lost

with a sense of longing.

Contested identities in prose

The first novel of E. L. Doctorow (1931–), Welcome to Hard Times (1960), was a

Western of sorts, but it was also a violent demythologizing of the romance of the

West which, in a manner to become typical of its author, explored the need for

community in an atomized, fragmented, destructively individualistic culture.

Doctorow has consistently used, expanded, or even subverted established generic

forms to explore an American paradox: the elaborate circuitries of wealth and

influence that connect one thing to another in American society and its fundamental

lack of cohesiveness, the lack of any real bonds between people other than those of

manipulation and use. In The Book of Daniel (1971), based on the case of Julius

and Ethel Rosenberg, who were put to death as convicted spies in 1953, Doctorow

used the form of the political novel to consider divisions that are social, familial, and

generational – a matter of the gap between old and new left as well as left and right,

sons and parents, immigrant and nonimmigrant cultures, Jewish people and gentiles.

For Ragtime (1975), an account of three fictional families at the beginning of the

twentieth century intertwined with such actual historical figures as Henry Ford,

Scott Joplin, Emma Goldman, and Harry Houdini, he turned to a form of the

historical novel that recalled U.S.A. by John Dos Passos. The historical sense and

social comment of Doctorow’s novel, however, are edged with a sense of absurdity.

Loon Lake (1980) is more the novel as hybrid, a mix of styles and perspectives.

World’s Fair (1985) is a fusion of memoir and scrapbook, and thinly disguised

autobiography. In Billy Bathgate (1989) and The Waterworks (1994) Doctorow uses

the generic conventions of the gangster novel and the Gothic novel to explore

different historical moments in the life of New York City. In The March (2006) he

deploys the form of the historical novel to explore the rupture of civil war; while in

Homer and Langley (2009) he uses the actual case of two brothers who were reclusive

hoarders to imagine lives lived on the fringes of society that mirror its waste and

accumulation. Doctorow is a tireless and accomplished experimenter in the forms of

the novel. Consistently, though, he has stretched those forms to accommodate and

test his vision of a society that is not so much a community as a conspiracy: a system

of vested interests that maintains itself by ubiquitous and often almost invisible

forms of control.

“We have two lives,” observes a character in The Natural (1952), the first novel of

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), “the life we learn with and the life we live after that.

Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.” All the novels of Malamud offer

variations on the theme sounded here. They are set in different times and places and

have very different nominal subjects. The Natural, for example, deals with baseball

as a realm of American heroism and myth. The Assistant (1957), Malamud’s second

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