Tokarczyk 2000 provides a political study. ![]() Williams 1996 looks at how Doctorow has been received in a postmodern era. Morris 1991 takes a more theoretical approach. Levine 1985, Harter and Thompson 1990, Parks 1991, and Fowler 1992 provide the first straightforward overviews of Doctorow’s oeuvre, spanning his first six to eight books. Doctorow is well known for his structural innovation his political, social, and historical concerns his blurring of the boundaries between fiction and fact and his treatment of such themes as family relationships, the horrors of war, identity, alienation, sexuality, history, justice, societal institutions, the American past, human consciousness, epistemological uncertainty, and the evils of corruption.īook-length treatments of Doctorow’s work mainly stem from the 1990s. Doctorow was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Dean Howells Medal, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, a Chicago Tribune Literary Award, a National Humanities Medal, and a PEN/Saul Bellow Award, among others. World’s Fair received the National Book Award in 1986, Billy Bathgate the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1990, and The March the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2006. His works, which appeared in such forums as the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Atlantic, Paris Review, and Gentleman’s Quarterly, continued to receive accolades. With the publication of The Book of Daniel, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1972, and Ragtime, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, Doctorow was established as a major American writer and best-selling author. In 1982 he became the Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Over the course of his career, he also held writer-in-residence or teaching positions at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Drama, the University of Utah, and Princeton University. By 1969 Doctorow had published two novels, one of which had been made into a movie, and was a writer-in-residence at the University of California at Irvine. His time as a script reader at Columbia Pictures, as a senior editor for the New American Library, and as editor-in-chief, vice president, and publisher at Dial Press led to his writing fiction full time. After leaving the military in 1955, Doctorow returned to New York, where he worked at various jobs. ![]() In 1954 he married Helen Setzer, also a writer, with whom he had three children. When the military draft interrupted his graduate work in 1953, Doctorow served two years with the US Army Signal Corps in Germany. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, he studied philosophy at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he was influenced by John Crowe Ransom and the New Critics, and then began graduate work in playwriting at Columbia University. A native of New York City and a descendent of Russian Jewish immigrants, Doctorow grew up in the Bronx. ![]() (Edgar Laurence) Doctorow (b. 1931–d. 2015) is a well-established American writer of twelve novels, three collections of short stories, one play, several screenplays, and numerous essays and miscellaneous items. Especially interesting have been the uses of history in Postmodernist fiction - notably in Barth and Pynchon - as well as in more apparently traditional writers who, while they have been deeply influenced by what we might now conveniently call the Postmodernist tradition, must be described as having literaiy motives which are in some ways quite different. At any rate, in recent years it has not been the historical consciousness of writers who might be strictly classified as historical novelists which has been the most interesting in regard to the uses of history, but rather the historical consciousness of those authors who represent some of the more experimental directions modem American fiction has taken in the late 20th century. Even in fiction the record is problematic : a few examples of perceptive historical imagination and countless romances of questionable insight. Doctorow and Historical Consciousness in American Fiction Since 1960Īmericans are notorious for their ignorance of history (as surveys of undergraduates unfailingly attest) or in some instances known for their obsession with it (as the endless flow of books on the Civil War illustrates). «Categories of Human Form» : Some Notes On E.
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