Doctorow, E. L. (1931—)

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Doctorow, E. L. (1931—)

As Matthew Henry noted in Critique, "E.L. Doctorow has made a career out of historical fiction, and he is renowned for both examining and rewriting the American past … because for Doctorow there is no fact or fiction, only narrative." In his attempt to examine the cultural myths of America and their impact on society, E.L. Doctorow created some of the most noted works of postmodern historical fiction of the late twentieth century through his unique ability to weave documented historical facts and figures with invented ones. As Henry noted, this brand of historical fiction allowed Doctorow to present different histories, not only those accepted by consensus. Doctorow's approach to history and his style of writing mark him as one of the significant contributors to the postmodern literary movement.

Edgar Laurence Doctorow was born in 1931 in New York City, the setting of many of his novels. Doctorow began his writing career within a decade after graduating from Kenyon College in 1952. His first three novels were experiments with different fiction genres. The first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, was a western and focused on the common theme of man's relationship to evil. Big as Life, Doctorow's second novel, was a science fiction work about two giants materializing in New York City. Yet, it was not until Doctorow experimented with the historical form in his third novel, The Book of Daniel, that he achieved commercial and critical success. It was here, in Doctorow's account of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their children, where he first experimented with what would later be called postmodern historical fiction—historical facts blended with contemporary fiction styles and elements.

Doctorow's postmodern historical fiction approached the writing of history as a reconstitution of history. Unlike the many historical fiction writers before him, he did not attempt to present history as fact. As he did with the Rosenbergs in The Book of Daniel, Doctorow's interweaving of historical facts and figures with fictional ones was best done in his fourth novel, Ragtime. This novel intertwined the lives of many famous historical figures, such as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, and Emma Goldman, with three fictional families—an upper class white family, a poor immigrant family, and a ragtime black musician's family. By mixing history with fiction, Doctorow confused and, to a degree, falsified history as he investigated the myths and realities of the American dream in Ragtime, a theme that reappears in his next novel, Loon Lake.

It is Doctorow's approach to history and writing style that make his novels postmodern. Just as Toni Morrison did in her novel Jazz, Doctorow used the combination of the repetition and improvisation in music to create a relentless narrative prose style in Ragtime, a style that would continue in his following novels. What at first may look like out of control prose became finely crafted prose that worked on multiple levels of meaning and interpretation, what Andrew Delbanco called more associative than sequential and what Michelle Tokarczyk called "accessible experimentation." Doctorow experimented with syntactical structures as well as point of view and voice, so there were many instances in his novels where it was difficult to ascertain who was saying what to whom, where the narrative did not instantly reveal itself. This postmodern language play added to the historical reconstructions, sometimes labeled allegorical romances, of twentieth-century American life as it occurred in Doctorow's novels.

In addition to writing novels, in the 1990s Doctorow has used his position in American society to take on many social issues. Citing what he called a "gangsterdom of the spirit," Doctorow believed American life near the end of the twentieth century was suffering from a loss of cohesion and morality. Some of his social projects of the 1990s include the saving of Walden Woods in Massachusetts, developing a cable television channel dedicated to books, peacefully settling the American conflict with Iraq, and analyzing the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

—Randall McClure