This long-unavailable work by one of America's most eminent and popular
writers appears in paperback for the first time.
Drinks Before Dinner, called "witty and provocative" by the New York
Times, is E.L. Doctorow's only play. A tour-de-force of language and
ideas concerning the individual's role in and response to contemporary
America, Drinks Before Dinner revolves around a dinner party for the
economically privileged.
As Doctorow writes in his introduction, "[This play] deals in general
statements about the most common circumstances of our lives, the numbers
of us, the cars we drive, the television we watch, the cities we live
in, our contraception and our armaments, and our underlying sense of the
apocalypse..."
For the past two decades, E. L. Doctorow has been counted among the
country's best-regarded men of letters. His novels include The Book of
Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World's Fair,
Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks. He has also published a volume
selected essays, Jack London, Hemmingway, and the Constitution. His
writings have garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award, the
National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation
for Fiction, and the William Dean Howells medal of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.
