Mark Royden Winchell, Joan Didion, revised edition (Boston: Twayne, 1989).
A study of Didion’s life and work with valuable notes and references. The con-
cluding chapter, “Threescore Miles and Ten,” describes a shift in the critical
reception of Didion’s work in the 1980s.

—Patrick Moser

h

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime

(New York: Random House, 1975)

While a student at the Bronx High School of Science, E. L. Doctorow was
assigned to write an essay about a “colorful person.” His description of the
German-Jewish refugee Karl, a Carnegie Hall stage doorman beloved by all of
the performers, so impressed his English teacher that she wanted to publish the
essay in the school newspaper. Pressed for more information and a photograph,
Doctorow admitted that he had made Karl up; the teacher changed his grade
to an “F.” Despite this early failure, Doctorow’s penchant for elaboration and
invention led to his success as a writer who blurs the lines between fact and fic-
tion. Doctorow told Christopher D. Morris, “History written by historians is
clearly insufficient”—a conviction borne out in his historical novels, including
Ragtime (1975), which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award
in fiction. Often described as Postmodernist, these works fuse fiction, history,
and Doctorow’s own biography to confront questions of epistemology. Overall,
Doctorow’s works suggest that history is only as truthful or accurate as the per-
spective from which it is presented.
Named for Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the
Bronx on 6 January 1931; his parents were second-generation Americans whose
own parents were Russian Jews. He majored in philosophy at Kenyon College in
Ohio, where he studied English under the poet John Crowe Ransom. After grad-
uating with honors in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University but
did not take a degree. Drafted into the army, he served in Germany from 1953
to 1955; in 1954 he married a fellow former Columbia student, Helen Selzer.
After his military service, he returned to New York and took a job as a reader for
Columbia Pictures, looking for books that could be adapted as movies. This work
was unsatisfying but provided lessons about narrative structure and technique
that later informed his writing. In 1959 Doctorow became a senior editor for the
New American Library. His first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), parodies
the plots of many of the Westerns with which he had become familiar—and been
frustrated by—in his Columbia Pictures job. In 1964 he moved to Dial Press as
editor in chief. He left publishing in 1969 to concentrate on his own writing.
His novel The Book of Daniel (1971) was based on the case of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg, who were arrested in 1950 on espionage charges and executed in

1953. Historical figures mingle with fictional ones, and fact is mixed with fantasy,

E. L. Doctorow 211