![]() Doctorow Society, no Doctorow Review or Doctorow Notes. In addition, all of these novelists - born, like Doctorow, in the 1930s - have literary societies and (with the exception of DeLillo) academic journals devoted exclusively to their work. There have been 13 books solely devoted to Thomas Pynchon, 14 on Philip Roth, 26 on Toni Morrison, nine on Don DeLillo, and 18 on Cormac McCarthy, as well as numerous other monographs and collections with one or more of these authors’ names in the title. Over that same period, a number of Doctorow’s generational contemporaries have received copious attention. For if the MLA International Bibliography is to be believed, only one monograph or essay collection on Doctorow has been published since the turn of the 21st century. The answer is likely to be: not recently. Reading this stream of glowing praise, scholars of American literature might have stopped to ask themselves when it was that they last read an academic essay devoted to Doctorow’s fiction. ![]() Poet and critic Michael Schmidt wrote a piece simply titled “My Hero: EL Doctorow.” Fiction and screenplay writer Amy Bloom went so far as to name Doctorow “the great American novelist of the last 100 years.” Saunders quoted similar tributes by Don DeLillo and Jennifer Egan, written when the three authors chose Doctorow as the 2014 recipient of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. Short story writer George Saunders responded to Doctorow’s passing by acknowledging the “tremendous sense of gratitude” he felt for the “bravery” of the latter’s work. Donald Margulies likewise acknowledged the electrifying impact Ragtime had on his work as a young playwright. Michael Chabon wrote of the encouragement Doctorow’s novel Ragtime (1975) had offered him when embarking upon his career-making The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). Lengthy obituaries were printed in all the major newspapers, and tributes flowed in from a stellar array of younger authors testifying to the inspiration gained from the older writer’s work. Doctorow, on July 21, 2015, at the age of 84, provoked a notably warm and widespread response. ![]()
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