![]() ![]() Doctorow’s fiction on the one hand - testified to by consistent sales, widespread reviews, and numerous prizes, even before this outpouring on the occasion of his passing - and a seeming lack of scholarly interest on the other? There may be many answers, but I’ll hypothesize one in particular: that the root of this disparity lies in Doctorow’s style. How then to explain it? Whence the disparity between a plethora of writerly and popular interest in E. I suspect my case for academic neglect has been made. In Lawrence Buell’s The Dream of the Great American Novel (2014), there is only a single sentence devoted to Doctorow, this time to Ragtime yet we find Michael Schmidt contending in his tribute essay that “if there was a great American novel it would be Ragtime.” Schmidt himself certainly gives ample space to Doctorow in his recent The Novel: A Biography (2014), but this is avowedly a popular survey rather than a scholarly one. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) does not mention Doctorow, despite the author having taught creative writing at various institutions from the 1970s on. The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011) includes a handful of mentions of one Doctorow novel, The Book of Daniel (1971), but finds no space in its 1,272 pages for any sustained engagement with his fiction. Even a contemporary like John Updike, who one might expect to offer less theoretical interest than Doctorow, has merited seven recent monographs, a literary society, and a scholarly journal.ĭoctorow likewise receives scant attention in some of the major scholarly surveys of American literature published over recent years. Doctorow Society, no Doctorow Review or Doctorow Notes. In addition, all of these novelists - born, like Doctorow, in the 1930s - have literary societies and (with the exception of DeLillo) academic journals devoted exclusively to their work. There have been 13 books solely devoted to Thomas Pynchon, 14 on Philip Roth, 26 on Toni Morrison, nine on Don DeLillo, and 18 on Cormac McCarthy, as well as numerous other monographs and collections with one or more of these authors’ names in the title. Over that same period, a number of Doctorow’s generational contemporaries have received copious attention. For if the MLA International Bibliography is to be believed, only one monograph or essay collection on Doctorow has been published since the turn of the 21st century. The answer is likely to be: not recently. Reading this stream of glowing praise, scholars of American literature might have stopped to ask themselves when it was that they last read an academic essay devoted to Doctorow’s fiction. Poet and critic Michael Schmidt wrote a piece simply titled “My Hero: EL Doctorow.” Fiction and screenplay writer Amy Bloom went so far as to name Doctorow “the great American novelist of the last 100 years.” Saunders quoted similar tributes by Don DeLillo and Jennifer Egan, written when the three authors chose Doctorow as the 2014 recipient of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. Short story writer George Saunders responded to Doctorow’s passing by acknowledging the “tremendous sense of gratitude” he felt for the “bravery” of the latter’s work. Donald Margulies likewise acknowledged the electrifying impact Ragtime had on his work as a young playwright. ![]() Michael Chabon wrote of the encouragement Doctorow’s novel Ragtime (1975) had offered him when embarking upon his career-making The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). Lengthy obituaries were printed in all the major newspapers, and tributes flowed in from a stellar array of younger authors testifying to the inspiration gained from the older writer’s work. Doctorow, on July 21, 2015, at the age of 84, provoked a notably warm and widespread response. ![]()
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