21 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

David Segal, “The Time Travels of E. L. Doctorow,” Washington Post, 1 October
2005 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/30/
AR2005093001847.html [accessed 2 March 2010].
Focuses on The March but provides an excellent overview of Doctorow’s oeuvre
and his “impish disregard for the wall between fact and fiction.”

Ben Siegel, ed., Critical Essays on E. L. Doctorow (New York: G. K. Hall, 2000).
Collection of essays and reviews with an introduction that summarizes them.

Richard Todd, “The-Most-Overrated-Book-of-the-Year-Award and Other Lit-
erary Prizes,” Atlantic Monthly, 237 ( January 1976): 95–96.
Argues against the critical acclaim garnered by Ragtime.

Richard Trenner, ed., E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations (Princeton: Ontario
Review Press, 1983).
Critical essays on various themes in Doctorow’s works, including the American
dream, history, literary influences, and music.

John Williams, Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E. L. Doctorow in the
Post-Modern Age (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996).
Surveys critical responses to Doctorow’s works from his first novel, Welcome to
Hard Times, to the mid 1990s.

—Linda Trinh Moser

h

Rita Dove, Selected Poems

(New York: Pantheon, 1993)

In the preface to her Selected Poems Rita Dove tells readers, “In books, I could
travel anywhere, be anybody, understand worlds long past and imaginary colonies
of the future.” Books were central to Dove’s intellectual formation while growing
up. She transfers her own reading experiences into poetry in which she imagines
different perspectives, bringing to life many subjects and people who have been
overlooked, forgotten, or erased from history and daily life. Never shying away
from difficult, painful, or unusual topics, she uses a disinterested manner and
controlled cadences to articulate the connections between the events of public
history and personal experiences. Born on 28 August 1952, in Akron, Ohio, she
is the second child of Ray A. Dove (who worked as an elevator operator before
becoming the first African American chemist in the tire industry) and Elvira
Hord Dove. As a high school senior, she was a presidential scholar, an honor
given to the top one hundred high-school students that year. In 1973 she gradu-
ated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
After graduation she studied at the University of Tübingen in West Germany as
a Fulbright-Hays fellow, and then was admitted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
where she earned the M.F.A. in 1977.