Books by E.L. Doctorow

Children have been able to read about Tom Sawyer with a sense of recognition for the feelings of childhood truly rendered: how Tom find solace for his unjust treatment at the hands of Aunt Polly by dreaming of running away; or how he loves Becky Thatcher, the sort of simpering little blonde girl all boys love, and how he does absolutely the right thing in lying and taking her punishment in school to protect her; or how he and his friends pretend to be pirates or the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest, accurately interrupting their scenarios with arguments about who plays what part...Tom Sawyer is surely among America's undisputed contributions to the world's cast of unforgettable characters.

Still the only anthology shaped each year by a different guest editor -- always a preeminent master of the form -- THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES is the essential yearbook of the American literary scene. Here are the most talked about short stories of the year alongside undiscovered gems. In his introduction, guest editor E. L. Doctorow writes, "Here is the felt life conferred by the gifted storyteller . . . who always raises two voices into the lonely universe, the character's and the writer's own." Doctorow has chosen a compelling variety of voices to usher in the new millennium, attesting to the astonishing range of human experience our best writers evoke.

In 1930's New York, Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old high-school dropout, has captured the attention of infamous gangster Dutch Schultz, who lures the boy into his world of racketeering. The product of an East Bronx upbringing by his half-crazy Irish Catholic mother, after his Jewish father left them long ago, Billy is captivated by the world of money, sex, and high society the charismatic Schultz has to offer. But it is also a world of extortion, brutality, and murder, where Billy finds himself involved in a dangerous affair with Schultz's girlfriend. Relive this story through the title character's driving narrative, a child's thoughts and feelings filtered through the sensibilities of an adult, and the result is E.L. Doctorow's most convincing and appealing portrayal of a young boy's life. Converging mythology and history, one of America's most admired authors has captured the romance of gangsters and criminal enterprise that continues to fascinate the American psyche today.

In 1967, Daniel, the son of two convicted spys executed by their own country, ponders his life, his sister's radicalism, his appreciation for his wife and son, and the hypocrisy of the moralistic ideals upon which this country was based.

In 1967, Daniel, the son of two convicted spys executed by their own country, ponders his life, his sister's radicalism, his appreciation for his wife and son, and the hypocrisy of the moralistic ideals upon which this country was based. Reader's Guide included. Reprint.

An accessibly priced edition of the early twentieth-century classic about a mixed-breed sled dog that heeds a primal desire to return to a feral life features an authoritative introduction and a student-friendly format. Original.

The theft and mysterious reappearance of a cross from a Manhattan church precipitates a hunt for the culprits that will soon uncover a strange prophecy about a rebirth of the United States. Reprint.

In a series of conversations with Christopher Morris, E. L. Doctorow talks with lucidity and candor about his own work and the work of other writers.

In a new collection of essays, the award-winning author of The March and Ragtime offers a series of reflections on the nature of imagination and creativity, looking at diverse forms of creative endeavor--from the literary and scientific to the comic and cosmic--as well as on his own creative process in his writings. Simultaneous.

E. L. Doctorow's only play revolves around a dinner party of the economically privileged. It is a tour-de-force of language an ideas concerning the individual's role in and response to contemporary America.

A collection of three novels by the best-selling author of Ragtime and the winner of the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction includes Billy Bathgate, World's Fair, and Loon Lake.

A tale inspired by a true story finds the blind Homer Collyer closeted within a once-grand Fifth Avenue mansion with his damaged brother and remembering a life marked by colorful characters, political events, and technological achievements. By the National Book Award-winning author of Billy Bathgate. Simultaneous.

A tale inspired by a true story finds the blind Homer Collyer closeted within a once-grand Fifth Avenue mansion with his damaged brother and remembering a life marked by colorful characters, political events, and technological achievements. By the National Book Award-winning author of Billy Bathgate.

A tale inspired by a true story finds the blind Homer Collyer closeted within a once-grand Fifth Avenue mansion with his damaged brother and remembering a life marked by colorful characters, political events, and technological achievements. (Historical fiction). Simultaneous.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has compiled his first collection of essays, a richly textured and detailed combination of literary criticism, political invective, and historical meditation.

Even the American Heritage Dictionary acknowledges that F. Scott Fitzgerald "epitomized the Jazz Age." And nowhere among his writings are the gin, pith, and morning-after squint of that era better illuminated than in these short essays. Selected in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Fitzgerald's birth, these shockingly candid personal memoirs--some written with his wife, Zelda--furnish nothing less than the autobiography of "the lost generation" of the 1920's.
"More than any other writer of these times," Malcom Cowley wrote in The New Yorker, "Fitzgerald had a sense of living in history." "The Jazz Age" celebrates F. Scott Fitzgerald's acumen for reportage and also offers a startling, tragic self-portrait of one of the century's greatest writers.

This collection of stories about Jews in Europe and in America includes work by Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, E. L. Doctorow, and Saul Bellow.

Saul Karoo, a successful but overweight, heavy-drinking, and chain-smoking Hollywood script doctor, searches for a solution to the personal problems that threaten his life and happiness, but the path he chooses may turn out to be even more deadly. Reprint.

Daniel Isaacson, whose parents were executed for treason, composes a unique document recalling the associations, and interpersonal relationships of his life.

At the peak of his literary fame and fortune, Jonathan walks out on his wife, moves into a Manhattan loft, and goes back through his life, reinventing his world through his writer's imagination.

Doctorow's 1980 novel is experimental in style and structure. The story--an exploration of the validity of the American dream, set during the Depression--is told not in a straight line but in concentric circles--like ripples on a lake.

Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march through Georgia and the Carolinas during the final years of the Civil War has a profound impact on the outcome of the war, in a richly textured, evocative historical novel that captures the full experience of the diverse characters caught up in the struggle.

For 125 years, The Nation magazine charted the course of political, social, and cultural events and shaped progressive thought with a depth and candor that caused it to be called "the conscience of America".ed letters from readers George Bernard Shaw, Adolf Hitler, and others. Line drawings.

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disap-pears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sig- mund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorows imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-able hardbound editions of impor-tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Librarys seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoringas its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

Filled with philosophical musings and personal observations, this fiction writer¦s take on the universe combines memoir with science to explore the American consciousness and experience. (Literature)

One of America’s premier writers, the bestselling author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and World’s Fair turns his astonishing narrative powers to the short story in five dazzling explorations of who we are as a people and how we live.

Ranging over the American continent from Alaska to Washington, D.C., these superb short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick townhouse in rural Illinois (“A House on the Plains”), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California (“Baby Wilson”), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas (“Walter John Harmon”), and sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages to a kind of bruised but resolute independence (“Jolene: A Life”). And in the stunning “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” you will witness a special agent of the FBI finding himself at a personal crossroads while investigating a grave breach of White House security.

Two of these stories have already won awards as the best fiction of the year published in American periodicals, and two have been chosen for annual best-story anthologies.
Composed in a variety of moods and voices, these remarkable portrayals of the American spiritual landscape show a modern master at the height of his powers.


From the Hardcover edition.

Three screenplays by the National Book Award-winner of Ragtime introduce readers to the fascinating, sometimes faltering relationship between novelist and Hollywood. (Drama)

While looking into the disappearance of a missing freelance book reviewer, McIlvaine, a reporter, finds himself roaming around the underground world of 1890s New York City, where he discovers a strange doctor who can keep the rich alive through macabre methods. Reader's Guide included. Reprint.

Set in the town of Hard Times in the Dakota Territory, Doctorow's early novel is his only Western.

Set in Manhattan and the Bronx in 1939, Doctorow's nostalgic novel is a slice of life seen through the eyes of a young boy who is distracted from the hardships of his own life by the dazzling promise of the World's Fair.