E. L. Doctorow died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was eighty-four. Widely celebrated for his often formally adventurous historical novels—“The Book of Daniel,” “Ragtime,” “Billy Bathgate,” and “The March,” among others—he received, over the course of his career, nearly every major award available to an American writer of fiction, some of them more than once.
He also, during the last twenty years, published many pieces in The New Yorker. “New York is home for my imagination—which is convenient, since I live here,” Doctorow said, in 1994, in a Talk of the Town story. He had just written “The Waterworks,” a novel set in New York City, in 1871. “When you write about the past,” he said, “you are always reflecting your own age.”
In 1995, Doctorow was one of five writers in the magazine who reflected on “Huckleberry Finn,” a book in which, in Doctorow’s words, “Civilization is a vicious confidence game played on a field of provincial ignorance.” Three years later, Doctorow wrote a Comment for the magazine about Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, an inquiry that brought to mind, for Doctorow, both Joseph McCarthy and the Salem witch trials.
In between those two pieces, he published “Heist,” the first of his short stories to appear in The New Yorker. It was followed by seven others: “A House on the Plains,” “Baby Wilson,” “Jolene: A Life,” “Walter John Harmon,” “Wakefield,” “Edgemont Drive,” and “Assimilation.”
After each of those last two stories appeared, Doctorow exchanged e-mails with the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, about the inspirations for the stories and the decisions he made while writing and revising them. Asked about how he captured the many voices in “Assimilation,” he explained, “You just listen and write down what you hear.” In 2008, he was a guest on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, on which he read and discussed John O’Hara’s “Graven Image.”
When John Updike died, in 2009, Doctorow remembered a letter that his fellow writer—who had complaints about Doctorow’s earlier novels, but who wrote, in a review for this magazine, that “The March” “pretty much cures my Doctorow problem”—had sent him a couple of years before. Doctorow shared part of that letter on this Web site. Updike had just received a prestigious award, but when Doctorow congratulated him on it, Updike said that he thought mostly of the writers who “can do things I can’t.”
“The self-doubt of this prodigious talent moved the hell out of me,” Doctorow wrote. “On the other hand it’s a good indication of the engine that drives us all, isn’t it?”
