American · 1931–2015
E.L. Doctorow wrote historical fiction that made American history strange and vivid. "Ragtime" wove real figures—Houdini, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan—through an invented family's story. "Billy Bathgate" won the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/Faulkner Award; "The March" won those prizes again for its account of Sherman's Civil War campaign. The American author treated history as raw material for literary invention, producing novels that felt simultaneously scholarly and anarchic.