Artist Profile
Award-winning author E.L. Doctorow explored the American experience in his best-selling novels, often incorporating historical settings and characters based on historical figures. Doctorow’s novel, The Book of Daniel (1971), was inspired by the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case, and one of his best-known works Ragtime (1975), which includes Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman and Theodore Dreiser as characters, was made into both a film (1981) and a musical (1998). Other novels include Billy Bathgate (1989) about a teenager pulled under the wing of mobster Dutch Shultz, and The March (2005), which centers on General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through the south at the end of the Civil War. E.L. Doctorow died on July 21, 2015 in New York City. He was 84 years old.