![]() ![]() While at Dial he wrote and published his next novel, a science fiction story entitled Big as Life (1966). In 1964 he became editor in chief of Dial Press, "a feisty little house, in which I got to edit James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Tom Berger and Bill Kennedy," among others. He got work as an editor at New American Library, where he edited everything from Shakespeare to the Mentor Science Library to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Seeing how much bad stuff was coming out gave me great confidence." For three years I got my hands on everything that was being published. "Being a motion picture reader was a wonderful apprenticeship for a writer. When he returned to New York he got a job as a staff reader for Columbia Pictures, whose cowboy movies inspired him to write a novel about the West, Welcome to Hard Times (1960). Within one year Doctorow was drafted to serve as a high speed radio operator in the U.S. When he graduated in 1952, he applied for Columbia University's graduate program and got in with the help of Robert Penn Warren. "He never published it, but he made writing - which for me had always been a dream - a reality."ĭoctorow then went to Kenyon College to study with poet John Crowe Ransom. But perhaps the most motivating event in his creative young life was when his older brother came home from the front lines of World War II to sit at the family kitchen table and write a book. He read indiscriminately - from pulp fiction to sports biographies to Cervantes. And home was full of books.Īt the Bronx High School of Science, Doctorow distinguished himself in poetry, painting and music composition. His father, the proprietor of a Manhattan music store, was so renowned for his knowledge of the obscure that Rubenstein, Horowitz, Heifetz, Stokowski and Toscanini would wander in to seek his advice. He was born in 1931 and grew up in "a richly informed household" in the Bronx, the second son of second-generation Americans of Russian descent. His 40-year marriage, his gentle humor, his impeccable manners, his grant-endowed career all attest to a cautiously crafted life. He makes it sound easy, but, in fact, Doctorow is a deliberate, hard-working man. But you know, when you're working well, the things you need - like history - come to hand. "I don't think of myself as a historian in any sense - my books are not thorough, not exhaustive. Doctorow summons history as he needs it, wrestling it to fit his own vision, his own mythology, of America. Although his books are steeped in history - cameos of New York in a very specific, very interesting time - they are more the products of his own life and imagination than of any elaborate research. "When I picked it up, I saw that it was a corporate history of the trolleycar business. "It was the color that drew me," he says, still marvelling at the mystical nature of the moment. He was roaming the inner recesses of the library one evening, pondering the difficulties of that question, when suddenly he caught sight of a brazenly orange book leaning toward him from the business shelf. ![]() via trolley, "from one town to the next, tossing a buffalo nickel in at the end of every stop on the interurban trolley line." The trouble was that he didn't know whether such a trip would have been possible. He wanted to move his character from Depression-weary New York City to Lowell, Mass. WHEN EDGAR LAWRENCE DOCTOROW was writing Ragtime (1975), his most celebrated novel, he puzzled over one tiny point of American history. ![]()
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