EL Doctorow, Witness to 'This Terrifying Century,' Dies at 84

Novelist Edgar Lawrence “E.L.” Doctorow, whose historical fiction and social commentary were said to “challenge the prevailing mythology of society,” died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan of complications from lung cancer. He was 84.

Born in the Bronx, Doctorow was the recipient of many distinguished literary prizes, among them the National Book Award, two National Books Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Humanities Medal, and most recently, the Library of Congress Prize for American fiction.

His work held a mirror to American society and, as the New York Times wrote in its obituary, “consistently upended expectations with a cocktail of fiction and fact, remixed in book after book.”

In interviews, Doctorow spoke of his responsibility to hold up that mirror. “The writer isn’t made in a vacuum,” Doctorow told journalist George Plimpton in 1986. “Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.”

Doctorow, who wrote a dozen novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage drama, as well as poems, essays, and commentary on literature and politics, was perhaps best known for Ragtime (1975), which took a close look at early 20th-century politics, racism, and women’s rights; Billy Bathgate (1989), which interrogated the myth of the self-made man in the (under)world of crime in the 1920s and 30s; and The March (2005), which reconstructed the monumental march of Union general William T. Sherman from Atlanta to Savannah toward the end of the Civil War. 

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Yet while much of his work examined moments in history, Doctorow reportedly didn’t care for being labeled a “historical novelist,” as he told NPR‘s Scott Simon in 2014: