E. L. Doctorow

During his lifetime E. L. Doctorow was a remarkable phenomenon among contemporary American novelists. He was a serious writer who was popular, a political writer who was a stylist, an original writer who was highly eclectic and an historical writer who invented the past. In this study, originally published in 1985, Paul Levine follows Doctorow’s progress as a novelist and traces the development of certain themes that recur in his work including the relationships between history and imagination,