The guilt, at least of Julius Rosenberg, became incontrovertible.

Only after 1989 did they come to believe the charges levelled against their parents. Besides that, the Rosenbergs’ two sons denied that their parents had betrayed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during and after the war. This is quite a feat, since people on the left have always been convinced that the Rosenbergs had been framed. The novel also resists the temptation to force the reader to take sides about the guilt of the Isaacsons/Rosenbergs. The novel displays Doctorow’s stylistic ventriloquism and narrative versatility, creating a rich, complex and often contradictory sense of historical reality. Daniel and his little sister, Susan, are, as it turns out, also the children of executed atomic spies, Rochelle and Paul Isaacson, who are modelled on “real life” spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in one of the most celebrated spy trials of the Cold War. Its central character, Daniel “Danny” Isaacson, is a history graduate student at Columbia just as it exploded in the student revolt of the spring of 1968. Th e Book of Daniel easily belongs among the best post-war, American historical novels, as it explores the political and historical landscape where the Old Left of the 1930s gave way to the New Left of the 1960s. Doctorow at home in Sag Harbor, NY in July, 2013. In fact, to move from The Book of Daniel to Ragtime is to move from high modernist to post-modernist fiction, a move that few other American writers are able to bring off. I mention all this to underscore the fact that Ragtime found its origin in Doctorow’s earlier, more interesting and powerful novel. In fact, near the end of The Book of Daniel (1971), which was also later turned into a film, Daniel (1983), the central character travels to Disneyland and analyzes what it is that Disneyland represents-reality turned into cartoon images, which are then given physical embodiment in a theme park mixing Disney fantasy and American history and geography. There is a neat historical/fictional self-referential aspect here, since one of Ragtime’s main concerns is the immigrant, largely Jewish, origins of the American film industry. This was helped along by the fact that it was turned into a film directed by Milos Forman in 1981. In the latter half of his career, Doctorow was most often identified as the author of the novel, Ragtime, a surprise bestseller in 1975. Besides all that, Doctorow simply wrote like a dream, no matter what fictional voice he chose to adopt. He explored the no-man’s land between modernist and post-modern fiction writing in ways that the two contemporaries with whom he can most plausibly be grouped, John Updike and Philip Roth, seldom did. His fiction was enriched by a fascination with popular culture, yet, literarily, he had a strong experimental streak. Doctorow was a novelist of coming-of-age in twentieth century America, one of the US’s few genuinely political novelists, and an historical novelist of great accomplishment. In later years, he taught writing at NYU and also did some screenwriting, besides, of course, his career as essayist and fiction writer. A child of the Depression, he studied with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in the 1950s and was editor for Norman Mailer and James Baldwin in the 1960s.

Since John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy, no American writer has sought to encompass the variousness of the national experience in quite the way E.L (Edgar) Doctorow did.

Books by el doctorow