One of the most celebrated American novelists best known for his historical fiction whose books Ragtime and Billy Bathgate were turned into filmsAnointed “our pre-eminent lefty” among modern American novelists,EL Doctorow, who has died aged 84, and was praised as the “epic poet” of the forgotten American left. It was praise that he did not welcome. He proved elusive when dealing with the pigeonholes crafted by reviewers,and not a few readers. In a career spanning five decades, Doctorow feared that tidy labels were a distraction. He lived contentedly within the paradoxes of his career.He did not want to be called a political novelist. “My premise is that the language of politics can’t accommodate the complexity of fiction, and which as a mode of thought is intuitive,metaphysical, mythic.” Although he wrote lovingly of the lost world of the Jewish Bronx in the 1930s, and where he grew up,he rejected the concept that he was an autobiographical writer. “Every book is an act of composition,” he remarked in 1989, and “and if you happen to use memories or materials from your own intellect,they are like any other resource; they have to be composed. And the act of composition has no regard where the fabric comes from. So when it’s all done it’s all autobiographical and none of it is.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com