The Time Travels Of E.L. Doctorow

The Reader, the Writer

Doctorow lives with his wife of more than 50 years and has two daughters. He plays a lot of tennis when he's isn't typing or hawking the hardbacks, and he adheres to a fairly rigorous work schedule: at the desk by 8 a.m., a few hours off in the middle of the day, then an afternoon session that lasts until 7:30 p.m. Everything is revised seven or eight times.

When he isn't touring, his life is pretty anonymous.

"I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am," Doctorow says with a shrug. "Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks."

He chose writing as a career at the age of about 9, he says, and aside from a two-year stint in the Army and work as a reservations clerk at La Guardia Airport, he's made words a full-time career. Among Doctorow's earliest jobs was reading books for Columbia Pictures, which hired him to unearth novels worth turning into films.

For three years at a book-a-day pace, Doctorow flagged a handful of novels for his bosses, but only one ever led to a deal: a Western called "They Came to Cordura," ultimately turned into the 1959 movie starring an aging Gary Cooper.

"It was one of the worst movies you've ever seen," Doctorow groans. "It was just an embarrassment. And that was the result of my three years of work."

During those script-scouting days, Doctorow realized he could make up stuff just as well as any of the authors he was paid to read. So he wrote "Welcome to Hard Times," a Western about a stranger who terrorizes a small town, later turned into a movie starring Henry Fonda. It was the first of several unhappy experiences with Hollywood. Aside from "The Book of Daniel," Doctorow sounds disappointed with the celluloid renderings of his work, including "Billy Bathgate," which starred Dustin Hoffman and Nicole Kidman, and "Ragtime."

"People have always said my work is cinematic, except the directors I've worked with," Doctorow sighs. "They tell me how difficult it is to translate because so much of my books are interior. So much of the action is in the mind, in the moral realm."

Doctorow started "The Book of Daniel" while toiling as an editor at Dial Press, which he left in 1968 for a teaching job at the University of California at Irvine, where he could spend mornings at his typewriter. He felt like he'd arrived.

His actual arrival date, however, was 1975, when a fictional account of America in the years leading up to World War I was published to raves, eventually selling more than 4.5 million copies. Some critics were troubled by the way "Ragtime" monkeyed with the past -- it imagines a meeting, for instance, between Freud and Jung at Coney Island, sharing a ride through the Tunnel of Love. But Doctorow isn't suggesting that this is the world as it was; this is the world as he's contrived it.

To his fans, these liberties have a larger point. "His big topic is challenging the official version of things," says John G. Parks, a professor at the University of Miami and author of "E.L. Doctorow -- Literature and Life." "Because it's usually the victors who tell the story and he feels that serious authors have a chance to challenge the official version of any story."

Put another way, he makes stuff up to get to the truth. Or to get to his truth, anyway. Doctorow has written publicly and forcefully about his politics, which lean strongly to the left. The war in Iraq had already started by the time he'd begun "The March," though he declines to go into particulars about the links between his latest book and the current fighting overseas. He'll leave that work to readers. But there's no mistaking where he stands on the war, or where he stands on the president and the men and woman shaping the administration. In the middle of this discussion he brings up Karl Rove and the investigation into Rove's role in the Valerie Plame media-leak investigation.

"I'd like to see him get nailed," Doctorow says dryly. "Bad man."