E. L. Doctorow,
a leading figure in contemporary American letters whose popular,
critically admired and award-winning novels — including “Ragtime,”
“Billy Bathgate” and “The March” — situated fictional characters in
recognizable historical contexts, among identifiable historical figures
and often within unconventional narrative forms, died on Tuesday in
Manhattan. He was 84 and lived in Manhattan and Sag Harbor, N.Y.
The cause was complications from lung cancer, his son, Richard, said.
The
author of a dozen novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage
drama, as well as essays and commentary on literature and politics, Mr.
Doctorow was widely lauded for the originality, versatility and audacity
of his imagination.
Subtly
subversive in his fiction — less so in his left-wing political writing —
he consistently upended expectations with a cocktail of fiction and
fact, remixed in book after book; with clever and substantive
manipulations of popular genres like the Western and the detective
story; and with his myriad storytelling strategies. Deploying, in
different books, the unreliable narrator, the stream-of-consciousness
narrator, the omniscient narrator and multiple narrators, Mr. Doctorow
was one of contemporary fiction’s most restless experimenters.
****
E. L. DOCTOROW’S works of fiction include Homer
& Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, the Book of Daniel,
City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The
Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his
honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle
Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction
and the presidentially-conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he
was short listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a
writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN
Saul Bellow Award given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a
sustained career places him in the highest rank of American Literature.”
In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.
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