"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.""History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.""I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.""I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.""I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.""In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.""It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.""Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.""Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.""The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.""There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.""We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.""Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.""Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.""Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
Edgar Lawrence ("E.L.") Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent. He attended city public grade schools and the Bronx High School of Science where, surrounded by mathematically gifted children, he fled to the office of the school literary magazine, Dynamo, where he published his first literary effort, The Beetle, which he describes as ”a tale of etymological self-defamation inspired by my reading of Kafka.”
Doctorow attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where he studied with the poet and New Critic, John Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions and majored in philosophy. After graduating with honors in 1952 he did a year of graduate work in English drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the army. He served with the Army as a corporal in the signal corps during the Allied occupation of Germany in 1954-55.
He returned to New York after his military service and took a job as a reader for a motion picture company, where he said he had to read so many Westerns that he was inspired to write what became his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. He began the work as a parody of the Western genre, but the piece evolved into a novel that asserted itself as a serious reclamation of the genre before he was through. It was published to positive reviews in 1960.
Doctorow had married a fellow Columbia drama student, Helen Setzer, while in Germany and by the time he had moved on from his reader’s job in 1960 to become an editor at the New American Library (NAL), a mass market paperback publisher, he was the father of three children. To support his family he spent nine years as a book editor, first at NAL working with such authors as Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand, and then, in 1964 as editor-in-chief at The Dial Press, publishing work by James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines and William Kennedy, among others.
In 1969 Doctorow left publishing in order to write, and accepted a position as Visiting Writer at the University of California, Irvine, where he completed The Book of Daniel, a freely fictionalized consideration of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Published in 1971, it was widely acclaimed, called a “masterpiece” by The Guardian, and it launched Doctorow into "the first rank of American writers" according to the New York Times.
Doctorow’s next book, written in his home in New Rochelle, New York, was Ragtime (1975), since accounted one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library editorial board.
Doctorow’s subsequent work includes the award-winning novels World's Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989) and The March (2005); two volumes of short fiction, Lives of the Poets I (1984) and Sweetland Stories (2004); and two volumes of selected essays, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993) and Creationists (2006). He is published in over thirty languages.
He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Drama, the University of Utah, the University of California, Irvine, and Princeton University. He is the Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. He has donated his papers to the Fales Library of New York University.
Doctorow is the recipient of the National Humanities Medal conferred at the White House in 1998.
