Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,381

This is the grave of E.L. Doctorow.

Born in 1931 in The Bronx, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow grew up as a second-generation Jewish-American. His father ran a music shop and was a great reader of American literature. So he named his kid after Edgar Allan Poe. Turned out to be a good choice. He went to public schools and went to Bronx Science for high school. It wasn’t a good fit as he wasn’t any good at science or math. Remember when the nation valued people whose brains did not lend themselves to STEM? Yeah, it was awhile ago now. Doctorow got involved in the school’s literary magazine and that was much better for him. He loved it. He started taking writing pretty seriously and decided this is what he wanted to do with his life.

Doctorow was a smart kid and I guess his father must have done alright eventually (I know the family didn’t have much money in the Depression) because his son went to Kenyon College in Ohio as opposed to, say, City College. Of course, he might have gotten a scholarship too. In any case, Kenyon was the home college of John Crowe Ransom, who is not real fondly remembered today given his leadership of the Southern Agrarians, the right wing and racist set of southern writers railing against social change. But the man could write and he had a ton of major writers as his students over the years. One of the most successful would be Doctorow. Among the others include Robert Penn Warren, Peter Taylor, and Robert Lowell. Anyway, Doctorow was very successful at Kenyon. He went on to Columbia for graduate school in English drama, but then was drafted so that wasted a couple years of his life. Luckily, Korea was wrapping up right around that moment. He was a signal corpsman in West Germany in 1954 and 1955.

Doctorow never did make it back to the drama degree. He got married in 1953 and they soon had three children. So he had to work. He worked for awhile reading for a movie company and then started working at the New American Library as an editor (of Ayn Rand among others; what a horrible experience reading that crap must have been given how bad the published books are). He supported himself for a long time this way. In 1964, he became editor in chief at Dial Press, where he published James Baldwin, among others. He had already published a couple of books in this period. The first, Welcome to Hard Times, from 1960, was influenced by all the bad westerns he had worked on while with the film company and he originally intended for it to spoof them, but then he wrote a serious novel. Simon & Schuster published it. It didn’t sell much, but the Times reviewed it favorably. In 1966, he published Big as Life, which did even less.

But Doctorow knew everyone and he knew he was a good writer. Also knowing that he could always go back to editing if it didn’t work out, in 1969, he left Dial to start on his own full-time writing career. Good call, as it turned out. When The Book of Daniel, a fictionalized account of the Rosenberg executions came out in 1971, it was widely acclaimed, a book that connected the 60s New Left to the 30s and 40s Old Left. Sidney Lumet adapted it into a film in 1983 with Timothy Hutton, but while I haven’t seen it, supposedly it is bad. Next was Ragtime, in 1975. This was a best-seller and is today considered a classic of American literature. Somewhat surprisingly I guess, I have never read it. I’d better fix that. It was another historically based novel, which mostly how Doctorow worked. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the first time it was granted. This time, it would be Milos Forman who adapted it for the screen, somehow getting James Cagney out of retirement to play in it. The critics were a lot more mixed on the film than the book.

World’s Fair, from 1985, not surprisingly taking place at the 1939 World’s Fair, won the National Book Award. Billy Bathgate, from 1989, won just about everything, including the PEN/Faulkner and the National Book Award. Robert Benton made a very bad film with Bruce Willis, Dustin Hoffman, and Nicole Kidman from it. Doctorow would win the PEN/Faulkner again for 2005’s The March. Doctorow was known for doing intense historical research for his books. I’ve long wondered why he never wrote anything that took place in the present, but whatever. Everyone has their style and this was his. The play actually was a contemporary story as well, from what I read about it. His last novel was Andrew’s Brain, from 2014, which didn’t get all that much attention outside of being a new Doctorow. He also published four volumes of short stories, a play he wrote in 1978, and later in life a lot of essays and essay collections. He also shows up as an advisor to Grover Cleveland in Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, speaking of disappointing films.

He was political to the extent of writing passionately about the horrors of George W. Bush’s actions in Iraq. People called him a political writer, but he never saw himself that way. Later in life though, he became more overtly political. Good on him to speak out on that horror. Doctorow’s late life speaking out includes this incredible New York Times op-ed from 2012 that I definitely recommend. Too bad not much has changed for the better since.

It is not surprising that Doctorow was a smoker and that is what killed him, He died of lung cancer in 2015, at the age of 84.

E.L. Doctorow is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Gardner, who won in 1976 for October Light, is in Batavia, New York and John Cheever, who won in 1978 for The Stories of John Cheever, is in Norwell, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.