Novelist E. L. Doctorow Dies

Cafe Society
1

E. L. Doctorow died yesterday, July 21, 2015.

You can play a game of greatness in post-war novelists, but Doctorow was great without qualification. I think his best books were The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and The March. He was almost always more at home in historicals, and his next tier - Billy Bathgate, World’s Fair, and Loon Lake - were also set in the past. Like all good writers of other times, he used the past to draw out universals, and so he may hold up better than writers who stuck to their now-dated contemporary worlds.

One of the immortals is now forever immortal.

2

He was my college graduation commencement speaker and gave a marvelous speech (I honestly don’t remember it very well after 25 years, but I remember how much I enjoyed it then). He will be missed.

3

Oh crap. I was thinking about him for the last few days.

4

Comes from New Rochelle, NY - home of Rob and Laura Petrie of the Dick van Dyke Show and one town over from my bedroom 'burb.

I must admit I had been pronouncing his name “DOC-tor-oh” and am hearing it on the radio as “doc-TOR-oh”.

:smack:

I enjoyed reading the books of his I did, but always kinda felt I was being lectured at. Not the same as being dazzled at, say, like by Nabokov, but more that I should hear the “real” points ELD was making as I read him.

5

The only novel ever assigned to me in high school in a history class was Ragtime. It was brilliant.

6

I always pronounced it the first way and Cory Doctorow pronounces it that way. They are probably related through grandparents or great-grandparents, although different branches of a family often pronounce names in different ways.

7

I’ve read almost all of Doctorow – at one time he was my favorite contemporary writer. My favorite is still the first, Welcome to Hard Times. I also love *World’s Fair *and Loon Lake. An amazing talent.

8

I had no idea that E. L. stood for Edgar Lawrence. That’s my son’s name!

9

I very much liked Homer & Langley. The last line will always stick in my mind.

10

Aw. Loved Ragtime, was delighted to find out the connection a few years later between that book and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas a few years after I’d read it–one of the first cross-pollination-among-books I’d become aware of as an adult (albeit a young one). The rest of Doctorow’s books that I’ve read were less memorable, but Ragtime was so outstanding…

11

I see his face,
I hear his heartbeat,
I look in his eyes,
How wise they seem,
Well, when he is old enough,
I will show him America,
And he will ride…
Our son will ride…
On the wheels of a dream.

R.I.P., E.L. (No coincidence that the Little Boy in Ragtime–the only named character in the white families–was named Edgar, right?)