NEW YORK — E.L. Doctorow, a leading figure in contemporary American letters whose popular, critically admired and award-winning novels — including Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and The March — situated fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts, among identifiable historical figures and often within unconventional narrative forms, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and Sag Harbor, N.Y.
The cause was complications from lung cancer, his son, Richard, said.
The author of a dozen novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage drama, as well as essays and commentary on literature and politics, Mr. Doctorow was widely lauded for the originality, versatility and audacity of his imagination.
Subtly subversive in his fiction — less so in his left-wing political writing — he consistently upended expectations with a cocktail of fiction and fact, remixed in book after book; with clever and substantive manipulations of popular genres like the Western and the detective story, and with his myriad storytelling strategies. Deploying, in different books, the unreliable narrator, the stream-of-consciousness narrator, the omniscient narrator and multiple narrators, Mr. Doctorow was one of contemporary fiction's most restless experimenters.
In World's Fair (1985), for example, a book that hews closely to Mr. Doctorow's autobiography and that the author once described as "a portrait of the artist as a very young boy" (but also as "the illusion of a memoir"), he depicts the experience of a Depression-era child of the Bronx and his awakening to the ideas of America and of a complicated world. Ending at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, the book tilts irresistibly toward the technological future of the country and the artistic future of the man.
The narrator is the man looking back on his childhood, but the conventionality of the narration is undermined in two ways. For one thing, the man's relatives get their own first-person chapters and inject their own memories, a strategy that adds depth and luster to the portrait of the time and place. For another, the man's own narration is offered in the present tense, as if the preadolescent character were telling an unfolding tale, though with the perspective and vocabulary of an adult.
Beginning with his third novel, The Book of Daniel (1971), an ostensible memoir by the son of infamous accused traitors, Mr. Doctorow turned out a stream of literary inventions. His protagonists lived in the seeming thrall of history but their tales, for the convenience — or, better, the purpose — of fiction, depicted alterations in accepted versions of the past.
In the book that made him famous, Ragtime (1975), set in and around New York as America hurtled toward involvement in World War I, the war arrives on schedule, but the actions of the many characters, both fictional and nonfictional (including the escape artist Harry Houdini, the anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman and the novelist Theodore Dreiser) were largely invented.
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Explore all your optionsWoven into the rollicking narrative of Ragtime are the dawn of the movies and the roots of the American labor movement, tabloid journalism and women's rights. The central plot involves the violent retribution taken by a black musician against a society that has left him without redress for his victimization. The events described never took place, but they contribute to Mr. Doctorow's foreshadowing of racial conflict as one the great cultural themes of 20th century American life.
In Billy Bathgate, a Depression-era Bronx teenager is seduced by the pleasures of lawlessness when he is engaged as an errand boy by the gangster Dutch Schultz, who is about to go on trial for tax evasion; it is not an allegory but, published in 1989, as the "greed is good" decade of the 1980s came to a close, the novel makes plain that Schultz's corrupt entrepreneurism is of a piece with the avaricious manipulations of white-collar financiers, forerunners of a Wall Street run amok.
"The distinguished characteristic of E.L. Doctorow's work is its double vision," the critic Peter S. Prescott wrote in Newsweek in 1984. "In each of his books he experiments with the forms of fiction, working for effects that others haven't already achieved; in each he develops a tone, a structure and a texture that he hasn't used before. At the same time, he's a deeply traditional writer, reworking American history, American literary archetypes, even exhausted subliterary genres. It's an astonishing performance, really."
Most of Mr. Doctorow's historical explorations involved New York and its environs, including Loon Lake (1980), the tale of a 1930s drifter who comes upon a kind of otherworldly kingdom, a private retreat in the Adirondacks; Lives of the Poets (1984), a novella and six stories that collectively depict the mind of a writer who has, during the 1970s, succumbed to midlife ennui; and The Waterworks (1994), a dark mystery set in Manhattan in the 1870s, involving a journalist who vanishes and an evil scientist.
More recently, in City of God (2000), Mr. Doctorow wrote about three characters — a writer, a rabbi and a priest — and the search for faith in a cacophonous and hazardous age, using contemporary Manhattan as a backdrop. And in Homer and Langley (2009), he created a tour of 20th century history from the perspective of a blind man, Homer Collyer, a fictionalized rendering of one of two eccentric brothers living on upper Fifth Avenue who became notorious after their deaths for their obsessive hoarding.
The March (2005) was Mr. Doctorow's furthest reach back into history, and it expanded his geographical reach as well, populating the destructive and decisive Civil War campaign of Gen. William T. Sherman — the capture of Atlanta and the so-called march to the sea — with a plethora of characters. Black and white, wealthy and wanting, military and civilian, sympathetic and repugnant, they describe a veritable representation of the American people.
Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction (also won by Billy Bathgate) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction (also won by Ragtime and Billy Bathgate), a finalist for the National Book Award (won by World's Fair) and the Pulitzer Prize, The March was widely recognized as a signature book, treated by critics as the climactic work of a career.
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx on Jan. 6, 1931. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father, David, had a store that sold musical instruments in the old Hippodrome building in midtown Manhattan; his mother, Rose, played the piano.
His family was a family of readers; he was named for Edgar Allan Poe, a favorite of his father's.
Mr. Doctorow studied with the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he earned a bachelor's degree, then spent a year in the graduate program in drama at Columbia, where he met his wife, Helen Setzer, then an aspiring actress. They married in Germany while Mr. Doctorow, who had been drafted, was in the Army. In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Doctorow is survived by two daughters, Jenny Doctorow Fe-Bornstein and Caroline Doctorow Gatewood, and four grandchildren.