E. L. Doctorow was a master of American fiction, whose works often wove history with fiction, exploring the American experience with remarkable depth. His style was characterized by fluid prose and a keen insight into the social and cultural forces shaping American life. Doctorow’s approach to writing involved a meticulous examination of the past, bringing it to life through compelling characters and powerful narratives. His works resonate with readers for their literary merit and his ability to capture the essence of the American story.
Welcome to America at the turn of the 20th century, where the rhythms of ragtime set the beat. In this original chronicle of the period, real-life characters such as Harry Houdini and Henry Ford intermingle with three remarkable families, one black, one Jewish and one prosperous WASP.
E. L. Doctorow's debut novel presents a powerful allegory of frontier life, exploring the struggles and complexities of the human experience in a harsh landscape. This work lays the groundwork for the themes and narrative style that would characterize his later acclaimed novels, offering readers a glimpse into the challenges and resilience of individuals in a formative period of American history.
While Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of his parents' lives, and is tormented by his past and trying to appreciate his own wife and son, he is also haunted. A fictionalization of a political drama that tore the United States apart, this is a tale of martyrdom and the search for meaning.
This novel is set in New York in the days of the Depression. It is the story of Billy Bathgate, who joins the notorious Dutch Schulz gang as a good luck charm, protege and apprentice mobster. Other work by the author includes "Ragtime" and "The Book of Daniel".
Edgar, nine, and his family have difficult times, but Edgar wins tickets for them to attend the New York World's Fair of 1939.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In E. L. Doctorow’s hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.
This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been an inadvertent agent of disaster. Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times—funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew’s Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.”
Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. As he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves.
This collection is a companion to the long-established and highly successful Modern Short Stories One and its essential aims are the same: to offer stories of high literary quality which, though written for adults, can be enjoyed and appreciated by adolescents. The fifteen stories included are by distinguished writers from Africa, America, Australia, India, Ireland, Italy and Great Britain; and within their artistic context several of them deal with the special personal and social concerns of society today.The collection includes stories by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Maeve Binchy, Garrison Keillor, Peter Carey, Flannery O'Connor and Nadine Gordimer.
From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel , World’s Fair , and The March , the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley , this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work. Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers–the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers–wars, political movements, technological advances–and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians...and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves. Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously written, this mesmerizing narrative, a free imaginative rendering of the lives of New York’s fabled Collyer brothers, is a family story with the resonance of myth, an astonishing masterwork unlike any that have come before from this great writer.
