Toward the end of the book Doctorow includes a harrowing description of execution by the electric chair. Daniel’s sister meanwhile makes an attempt to end her life. He is drawn alternately to “revolutionary” gestures and to attempts at a more sober consideration of the first half of the 20th century, which never proceeds very far. Its central character, Daniel, the son of the Isaacsons (characters based on the Rosenbergs) gives vent to the anger and political confusion of the time. His novel takes place during the student protests of the late 1960s.
That horrifying event must have had a powerful impact on Doctorow as a 22-year-old.
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His first major critical success came with The Book of Daniel, centered on a fictionalized account of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for allegedly passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. Critic Douglas Fowler points to the book’s “pessimistic” argument in favor of “the human instinct toward violence and revenge.” An “anti-Western,” the novel, which presumably alludes not only to the lawless American frontier, but to traumatic world events of the mid-century, takes a relatively dim view of humanity. The survivors have to make the effort to rebuild before the marauder returns. A sociopath comes into town and commits terrible crimes, leaving the place in smoking ruins. In 1960 Doctorow published his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, set in a small settlement in the Dakota Territory in the late 19th century. He remarked later in life how influenced he had been as well by New York City’s theaters, museums and concert halls, and the city’s cultural climate as a whole: “As I grew up I was a beneficiary of the incredible energies of European émigrés in every field-all those great minds hounded out of Europe by Hitler.”ĭoctorow attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he began to write, and then Kenyon College in Ohio, where he was a student of the conservative Southern poet and founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism, John Crowe Ransom. The future writer was a voracious reader as a child. In 1948 the Stalinist-influenced American Labor Party elected a Congressman from the Bronx, its second from New York City. (He was named after Edgar Allan Poe, a favorite writer of his father’s, who spent the last several years of his unhappy life, 1846-49, in a cottage in the Bronx).ĭoctorow came of age at a time when a socialist milieu was very much part of life in New York City, particularly among Jewish workers and intellectuals.
He also authored a play, Drinks before Dinner, and three books of short fiction, and he published hundreds of articles and essays on literature and on political issues from a left-liberal standpoint.Įdgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in 1931 in the Bronx, the child of first-generation Americans of Russian-Jewish ancestry. By all public accounts, he also seems to have been a thoroughly decent person.ĭoctorow wrote a dozen novels, including The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), World’s Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989) and The March (2005). Even if not possessed of the most inspired artistic gifts, he represented something honest and principled in American literature. Doctorow belonged to the same postwar generation as fellow authors John Updike and Philip Roth. Doctorow died at the age of 84, from lung cancer. On July 21 the prominent American writer E.
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