"I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me," he recalled. Named after Edgar Allan Poe, whom he praised and disparaged as "that strange genius of a hack writer," young Edgar Doctorow read widely and decided he would become an author at age 9. 6, 1931, in New York, his early years remembered warmly in "World's Fair." His father, David Doctorow, ran a music store, and his mother, Rose Doctorow, was a pianist. They had two daughters and a son.Įdgar Lawrence Doctorow was born Jan. On Twitter, President Barack Obama praised Doctorow as "one of America's greatest novelists."ĭoctorow taught creative writing at New York University and was an instructor at Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of California, Irvine. "I would want a presidential temperament keen with a love of justice and with the capacity to recognize the honor of humbled and troubled people." He is the artificer of our malleable national soul," he wrote in the liberal weekly The Nation, for which he was a frequent contributor. "With each new president, the nation is conformed spiritually. In 1992, as the first George Bush opposed Democrat Bill Clinton, Doctorow considered the role of chief executives in American culture. Bush and urge him not go to war against Iraq or, to some boos, criticize the second President Bush and second Iraq War in a commencement speech at Hofstra University on Long Island. He might write an open letter to then-President George H.W. And this was entirely unplanned."Ī balding man with a soft goatee and impish expression, Doctorow was little known to the general public before age 40, but by late middle age was not just a popular author but a kind of wise man and liberal conscience. "Someone pointed out to me a couple of years ago that you could line them up and in effect now with this book, 150 years of American history. "I don't know what I set out to do," Doctorow told The Associated Press in 2006. Mixing fictional characters with historical figures, he looked back to the Civil War ("The March"), the post-Civil War era ("The Waterworks"), the turn of the 20th century (the million-selling "Ragtime"), the 1930s ("Billy Bathgate," ''Loon Lake," ''World's Fair") and the Cold War ("The Book of Daniel"). He forged his reputation around a series of novels - most set in and around New York City - that carried readers from the 1800s to modern times. His prizes included the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle award and both competitive and honorary National Book Awards. "This belief is akin to the scientist's faith in the scientific method as a way to truth."ĭoctorow was among the most honored authors of the past 40 years. "Underlying everything - the evocative flashes, the dogged working of language - is the writer's belief in the story as a system of knowledge," he wrote in the introduction to his essay collection "Creationists," published in 2006. Student of political and literary history and how they tell us who we are now.ĭoctorow, who died Tuesday at age 84, was the rare American writer to move gracefully between lives as engaged citizen and solitary inventor. Commentator on wars and presidents and the laws of the land. Doctorow's.Ĭonjurer of old-time gangsters and ragtime stars. NEW YORK (AP) - Few minds were as playful and as serious as E.L.
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