The 20th century is over but the American century lives on, and will endure in Doctorow’s magnificent body of work. His writing informed my understanding, and has stayed with me. I was hungry for clues to what adults cared about and to what being an American meant. I began with Ragtime, and was captivated by the flowing way Doctorow integrated historic events, the changing roles of women and African Americans, and-I’ll admit-raciness, into his storytelling. Doctorow’s writing as a child in the 1970s and ’80s, pulling his novels from my parents’ shelves. Literary critic and translator Liesl Schillinger offered this stirring tribute to him at the induction ceremony:

In 2012 he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Over the next half-century he would continue to reexamine the American past, and simultaneously reanimate the form of the historical novel, in a string of contemporary classics that include The Book of Daniel (1971), a fictional treatment of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage case Ragtime (1975), later adapted for both film and Broadway Billy Bathgate (1989), a recreation of the Depression-era Bronx of his childhood and The March (2005), which brought the author’s imagination to bear on the closing months of the Civil War.ĭoctorow won the National Book Award, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, to name just a few of his many laurels. He was born in the Bronx in 1931 and published his first novel, the spare, haunting neo-Western Welcome to Hard Times, in 1960. Doctorow died in New York City on Tuesday, July 21, at the age of 84.

Books by el doctorow