![]() In between those two pieces, he published “ Heist,” the first of his short stories to appear in The New Yorker. In 1995, Doctorow was one of five writers in the magazine who reflected on “Huckleberry Finn,” a book in which, in Doctorow’s words, “Civilization is a vicious confidence game played on a field of provincial ignorance.” Three years later, Doctorow wrote a Comment for the magazine about Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, an inquiry that brought to mind, for Doctorow, both Joseph McCarthy and the Salem witch trials. “When you write about the past,” he said, “you are always reflecting your own age.” He had just written “The Waterworks,” a novel set in New York City, in 1871. ![]() “New York is home for my imagination-which is convenient, since I live here,” Doctorow said, in 1994, in a Talk of the Town story. He also, during the last twenty years, published many pieces in The New Yorker. ![]() Widely celebrated for his often formally adventurous historical novels-“The Book of Daniel,” “Ragtime,” “Billy Bathgate,” and “The March,” among others-he received, over the course of his career, nearly every major award available to an American writer of fiction, some of them more than once. “One of my children once said – it was a terrible truth, too, and, of course, it had to be a young child who said this – ‘Dad is always hiding in his book.’”Īuthor Margaret Atwood was among those who paid tribute, saluting her “oldpal”, whom she called a “pivotal” writer and “always kind and funny”.E. You can get away with an awful lot,” he told the Paris Review. “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. He married Helen Setzer in 1954, and they had two daughters and a son. If you’re doing it right,” he continued, “the reader will know who’s talking.” I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page. I detest semi-colons – I don’t think they belong in a story. It’s an astonishing performance, really.”ĭoctorow himself said of his literary style: “I like commas. At the same time, he’s a deeply traditional writer, reworking American history, American literary archetypes, even exhausted subliterary genres. Prescott wrote in 1984: “In each of his books he experiments with the forms of fiction, working for effects that others haven’t already achieved in each he develops a tone, a structure and a texture that he hasn’t used before. In 2014, he was honoured with the Library of Congress prize for American fiction, an award he said would help soothe his chronic “self-doubt”. He went on to win awards for Ragtime (1975), World’s Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989) and The March (2005). He combined writing with working as an editor through the 60s with writers including Ian Fleming, Ayn Rand and Norman Mailer, before he left the world of publishing in 1969 to write full-time. “So I wrote a parody in a fit of rage, showed it to the story editor, and he said: ‘This is good, you want to make a novel out of this.’ I crossed out the title, wrote ‘Chapter One’, and went from there.” “It was making me ill, reading one lousy western after another,” he told the Guardian. His first novel, Welcome to Hard Times - published in 1960 when he was 28 - was inspired by a stint working as a reader for a film company. I was too young to understand the Depression or fight in World War II. He was drafted into the US army in Germany during the 1950s, serving as a corporal in the signal corps during the Allied occupation and telling the Paris Review: “I seem to be of a generation that has somehow missed the crucial collective experiences of our time.
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