We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're
inside it." "We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us
because we're inside it." At the outset of his career E. L. Doctorow
told Paul Levine, "History written by historians is clearly
insufficient." Doctorow's novels carry out that conviction by imagining
the great moments of American history--the Old West, the gilded age, the
Depression, the cold war--as backdrops for tales of excruciating moral
pain and injustice in America. In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow
Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory
interviews with the acclaimed author of Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy
Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and other novels, plays, and short
stories. Whatever the setting or time period, Doctorow's characters
spark an unparalleled urgency in the novelist's recreations of history.
In his work the American dream and the values his characters try to live
by turn to madness and ashes. Within this collection Doctorow explores
the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary
history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American
culture. Talking about style, Doctorow discusses his experiments with
shifting points of view and unreliable narrators as part of the
modernist heritage to which readers have become accustomed. But he
stresses that these techniques are always subordinate to the telling of
a good story and the creation of memorable characters. "My portrait of
J. P. Morgan in Ragtime is truer to the man's soul and the substance of
his life than his authorized biography," he says. Doctorow's critical
and popular success comes from the creation and re-creation of such
great characters and the telling of captivating stories in which the
writer serves as an independent witness to both the ideals and the
corruptions that have driven our history. Christopher D. Morris has been
the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Norwich University in
Northfield, Vermont, since 1996. He is also the author of Models of
Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow and regularly
publishes in journals like The Ohio Review, Critique, and Film
Criticism.
