E.L. Doctorow

The March: A Novel

E.L. Doctorow

• 2006 PEN-faulkner winner
• 2005 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2006 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 38.56

In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and…

Billy Bathgate

E.L. Doctorow

• 1990 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1989 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 1990 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1989 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.4

In 1930’s New York, Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old high-school dropout, has captured the attention of infamous gangster Dutch Schultz, who lures the boy into his world of racketeering. The product of an East Bronx upbringing by his half-crazy Irish Catholic mother, after his Jewish father left them long ago, Billy is captivated by the world of money, sex, and high society the charismatic Schultz has to offer. But it is also a world of extortion, brutality, and murder, where Billy finds himself involved in a dangerous affair with Schultz’s girlfriend. Relive…

Ragtime

E.L. Doctorow

• 1975 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 1975 Nebula nominee
• Score: 16.25

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.

The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears.…

Loon Lake

E.L. Doctorow

• 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1980 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 12.32

It is America in the great depression, and he is a child of that time, that place. He runs away from home in Paterson, New Jersey, to New York City and learns the bare bones of life before he hits the road with a traveling carnival. Then one icy night in the Adirondacks, the young man sees a private train roar by. In its lit windows, he spies an industrial tycoon, a poet, a gangster, and a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. He follows them, as one follows a dream, to an isolated private estate on Loon Lake.

Thus the stage is set for a spellbinding tale of…

World's Fair

E.L. Doctorow

• 1986 NBA–Fiction winner
• Score: 10.36

New York is the setting and a central character in this wonderfully moving and evocative novel of a boy growing up and a family surviving in the 1930s.

Told in the voices of its young protoganist, his mother, and his older brother, the story unfolds against a back-ground of the grim economic realities of the Great Depression and the indomitable hopes for the future as embodied in the wondrous exhibits of New York’s World’s Fair. The Altschulers, living in successively smaller apartments in the Bronx, are prey to both. As the raffish father’s Times Square music…