Best Selling Books by E. L. Doctorow

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time 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, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow''s 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.

A young boy is asked to maintain the fiction that his father is alive. A young woman is shot at by a hunter. A schoolgirl dies in an exploding car. In Lives of the Poets, six tense, poignant, and mysterious stories are followed by a novella in which the writer emerges from his work to reveal his own mind. Here the images and the themes of the earlier stories become part of the narrator''s unsparing confessions about his own life. Separated from his own family, he chronicles the edgy urban landscape around him, discusses marriages that fail but continue to entangle spouses, the influence of wives and other women, and the obsessions that haunt him. And in this brilliant, funny, and painful story about the story, the writer''s mind in all its aspects--its formal compositions, its naked secrets--emerges as a rare look at the creative process and its connection to the heart. An astonishing work, Lives of the Poets varies from realistic to dreamlike to become a virtuoso performance by E. L. Doctorow, deftly done by an author in total control of his craft, aware both of the enormity of his talent...and the price it exacts.

Doctorow''s novels imagine the great moments of American history - the Old West, the Depression - as backdrops for tales of moral pain and injustice. In these interviews, Doctorow explores the themes of his work.

An assortment of short fiction ranges across America, from Alaska to the District of Columbia, as it explores the complexities of modern life in such stories as "Jolene: a Life," "A House on the Plains," "Baby Wilson," and "Walter John Harmon."

In the last years of the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, cutting a 60-mile wide swath of pillage and destruction. That event comes back in this magisterial novel. High school & older.

During the Great Depression of the ''30s, a passionate, young New Jersey man leaves home to find his fortune. What he finds is a life so different from his own that it changes his destiny. A haunting story of dreams and desires, repackaged to match Doctorow''s other bestsellers. Reprint from Bantam. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Published here for the first time, the scripts to "The Book of Daniel, Ragtime" and "Loon Lake" reveal a new aspect of Doctorow''s remarkable talents and offer film students insight into the complex relationship between literature and motion pictures.

Rich with philosophical asides, historical speculations, personal observations, and literary judgments, "Reporting the Universe" ranges from the circumstances of Doctorow''s own boyhood and early work to the state of modern society.