You’re doing what a painter does when he paints a portrait. “When you use a historical character like Sherman,” he explained, “it’s your Sherman.
William Tecumseh Sherman’s march as a kind of native Grand Guignol. In “The March” (2005) - his last great novel - he reimagined Gen. In “Ragtime” (1975), he crafted a big American novel inspired by John Dos Passos, juxtaposing historical figures such as Emma Goldman, Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit with characters of his own creation to tell a story of the United States at the turn of the last century, a nation of possibility on the one hand and scabrous inequality on the other. Each book was a different experience, with its own set of challenges and expectations. This quality of looking beyond himself, of seeking stories that were broader than personal testimony, was what set Doctorow apart. It wasn’t until I realized that Daniel should write the book, that it should be his voice rather than mine, that it began to work.” In ‘The Book of Daniel,’ I wrote 150 pages and threw them away, they were so bad. I don’t ever want to hear my own voice it’s one of the worst things that can happen. “I think there’s a kind of ventriloqual thing that goes on when I write. “Every book has its own voice,” the author told me in 2006. That, in his case, history was both personal and collective made him a quintessential Doctorow character.
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His first novel, “Welcome to Hard Times” (1960), written while he was a reader for a movie company, took the conventions of the western and upended them, highlighting the inevitability of evil, or at least of chaos, and our weakness or indecision when faced with it.īut it was only with the publication of his third novel, “The Book of Daniel” (1971), that Doctorow truly found his métier, blending history and imagination to tell the story of Daniel Lewin, adult son of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, a couple modeled on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and, like them, executed at the height of the Cold War.ĭaniel is a tormented character, adrift amidst the radicalism of the 1960s, on the run from history. More than Philip Roth or John Updike, more even than Norman Mailer, Doctorow created fiction that existed at the intersection of American myth and hypocrisy. Doctorow, who died Tuesday of complications from lung cancer at 84, was perhaps the most American novelist of his generation.