'What was wonderful about him is that he was gentle and he was humorous and he wore his constant passion for justice very lightly. Gordon, who worked with Doctorow on free speech issues in the PEN American Center, says he was not afraid to speak out on subjects that were important to him. 'Everything that he wrote was really about a vision of America as it could be,' says novelist Mary Gordon, who calls Doctorow an idealist. Known best for his historical novels, like Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, Doctorow often mingled fictional characters with figures from history books, in vivid and playful ways. But he did love mixing some facts into his fiction. 'I hadn't expected that kind of enthusiasm,' Doctorow recalled, 'and I said, well, 'Not exactly, there is no Carl.' I made him up.'ĭoctorow, who died of complications from lung cancer Tuesday at the age of 84, was never meant to be the kind of guy who cared much for the old journalistic pillars of who, what, when, where, why and how. His teacher, apparently, loved the story so much, she wanted to publish the story in the school paper - so she told Doctorow to get a photo of the man. As he told NPR back in 2003, he wrote a profile of a doorman at Carnegie Hall who was beloved by all the performers there.

Doctorow used to tell a story about a journalism class he took as a high school student in the Bronx. 'I think really of myself as a national novelist I am an American novelist writing about my country.'Į.L. Doctorow told it, the phrase 'historical novel' is something of a misnomer when it comes to his writing.

Author of billy bathgate