#EL DOCTOROW NOVEL SERIES#

I was not a realist I was not interested in reportage. Only subsequently, on reflection, did I realize what my strengths were. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you wish you had known anything that you now know when you started the first book?ĭOCTOROW: Of course, the first book didn’t teach me anything about writing while I was writing it. Editors and publishers are comfortable with genres they are not frightened by them. I am in a receptive state of mind, and something evocative happens.īut the lesson in that for a young writer might be to find a genre that he or she recognizes as a possibility for serious work. So in that sense my approach hasn’t changed since that first book. And thereafter it would always be in the nature of this kind of unplanned circumstance that would get me going-I would be transfixed by a photograph, or hear a conversation, or even respond to a piece of music. So to answer your question: it was the circumstance of having that job that led to the writing of the novel. They put out a banner over the town’s one street: Welcome to Hard Times. The inhabitants named it Hard Times, having found the mythological promise of the West not forthcoming as they scratched out a living and tried to fend off lawless wandering sociopaths. I wrote about a bleak Western town on treeless land. But the more I wrote, the more I was taken with the idea of composing something serious. So it was as a means of maintaining my sanity that I would of course sit down and write a parody of the genre. As the junior reader in this company I was relegated to reading Westerns, a genre popular at the time. My job was to read books, usually in galleys, to see if they were viable film material. DOCTOROW: My first novel happened because I was working as a reader for a film company. WASHINGTON SQUARE: How do you feel your writing or your approach to writing has changed since the publication of your first book in 1960?Į. He met with us on a winter afternoon in his office at the NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House in Greenwich Village. He is a longtime popular professor in the Creative Writing Program at NYU and he graciously agreed to speak with Washington Square. Doctorow has received three National Book Critics Circle Awards, the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner awards, and the National Book Foundation’s 2013 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Both consistent and surprising, Doctorow re-imagines his fiction to provide fresh, relevant texts for a loyal readership.Īmong many awards, E. He is, in that way, one of the most generous writers working today. It is both emblematic of the author’s style and completely original, set apart in tone and format from Doctorow’s previous works.

#EL DOCTOROW NOVEL SERIES#

The novel, about a cognitive scientist addressing the losses of his life, pushes the reader into a baffling and poignant series of questions about the novel, the mind, and the mind in the novel. His latest book, Andrew’s Brain (Random House, 2014), is another new journey. Doctorow encapsulated his philosophy: “Writing is not a matter of inventing it’s a matter of discovering.” Throughout his prolific career-he has written twelve novels over fiftyfour years-Doctorow has relentlessly pursued such discovery, with novels that explore subjects ranging from the Bronx to Harry Houdini to the Civil War.

Kate Brody and Dana Isokawa An Interview with E.

El doctorow novel