E. L. Doctorow: Three Early Novels (LOA #403): Welcome to Hard Times / The Book of Daniel / Ragtime - Hardcover
Synopsis
For the first time in one volume, three brilliantly artful novels that reinvented the genre of historical fiction.
Inaugurating Library of America’s authoritative edition of the works of E. L. Doctorow, this volume gathers three novels that announced a major new voice in American fiction, and offered profoundly inventive and unflinching visions of American history.
Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Doctorow’s impeccably crafted debut book, revisits romantic myths of the American frontier. Reduced to smoldering ruins by a sociopathic outlaw, the little town of Hard Times, somewhere in the Dakota Territory of the 1870s, finds new hope in Blue, who may be the last good man.
The Book of Daniel (1971) finds Doctorow excavating the political anxieties of the Cold War. Daniel Isaacson struggles to make sense of the inheritance he has received from his parents, loosely modelled on convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, assembling a fractured narrative that blends memory and personal confession with historical inquiry and judgment.
Ragtime (1975)—a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award—brings Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini and other historical characters into Doctorow's fictional world, giving us a vibrant, expansive, darkly playful panorama of early twentieth-century America.
Together, these three novels chart the emergence of a writer who reshaped the possibilities of historical fiction and redefined how American stories can be told.
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About the Author
E. L. DOCTOROW (1931–2015) remains one of the most significant literary voices of his generation. His novels include Welcome to Hard Times (1960), The Book of Daniel (1971), a National Book Award nominee in 1972; Ragtime (1975), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1976; World’s Fair (1985), which won the 1986 National Book Award; Billy Bathgate (1989), winner of the PEN/Faulkner prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the William Dean Howells medal, 1990; The Waterworks (1994); City of God (2000); and The March (2005), which received the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award and the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. His story collections include Lives of the Poets (1984) and Sweetland Stories (2004). His books of essays include Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution (1993), Reporting the Universe (2003), and Creationists (2007). Several of his novels have been adapted for the screen, including The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate.
BRUCE WEBER, a veteran New York Times reporter and obituary writer, is currently at work on the first full-scale biography of E. L. Doctorow. His previous books include As They See ’Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires (2009) and Life Is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist (2014)
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