In the following essay, Matterson addresses the ideas about writing suggested by the stories in Doctorow's Lives of the Poets.

In the following essay, Cooper examines the political concerns of Doctorow's work.

In the following essay, Parks applies recent critical theory to a study of the political and historical elements of Doctorow's fiction.

In the following essay, Stark explores the relationship between E. L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel and the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

In the following essay, Miller provides a detailed analysis of "Willi," from Lives of the Poets, pointing out its psychological complexities.

Surely the best-known work by E. L. Doctorow is Ragtime (1974)…. But Doctorow's other two novels, Welcome to Hard Times (1960) and The Book of Daniel (1971), which have been obscured by the commercial hoopla over Ragtime, may in some respects be better pieces of fiction. (p. 397) The novels are rich in texture and themes, actually too rich to discuss comprehensively here. However, there is a central motif in all three which gives both structure to the plots and a tone of irony to the character...

In the following review, Delbanco presents an appreciation of the symbolic features of The Waterworks and comments briefly on the essay collection Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution.

In the following interview, Doctorow discusses his views of The Waterworks and elaborates some ideas on writing fiction.

Like U.S.A., Ragtime contains a satiric commentary upon the development of American society in the early years of the twentieth century…. While Doctorow evinces a far keener awareness of the problems stemming from sexual and racial oppression in the prewar period, he and Dos Passos are similarly concerned with formulating a radical critique of capitalism. At the same time both authors infuse into their portraits a curious admixture of nostalgia…. (p. 86) In addition, despite some evident dispa...

In the following review, Schama focuses on the historical aspects of The Waterworks.

In the following review, Fender considers points raised in essays in Poets and Presidents and discusses the thematic and aesthetic aspects of The Waterworks in relation to Doctorow's previous fiction.

In the following excerpt, Parrinder discusses Doctorow's narration in the tales that make up Lives of the Poets.

In the following review, Franzen discusses the setting, character and plot of The Waterworks and compares the book to Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and The Book of Daniel.

[As] John Barth pointed out some time ago, the modern, or at least the modernist, novel is in constant danger of petering out into a one-sentence idea whose actual performance over the length of a book is of little consequence…. On this level, Ragtime is an immense success. When the first rumours of it were filtering out from the advance extracts published in New American Review, I heard of it as one might hear a new joke that is going the rounds of the office. Here was this new book that had Freud a...

[Ragtime] is distinguished from most other music by its use of rhythm, its syncopation. As the pianist opposes syncopations in his right hand against a precise and regularly accented bass, the delayed and misplaced accents and their conjunction with regular meters set up the complex polyrhythms of ragtime. These subtle conflicting rhythms with their own free "inner voices" provide both the structural and metaphorical basis for E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime…. At first glance Doct...

In the following review of The Waterworks, Shechner takes account of the novel's strengths and failings.

In the following review, Whitworth informs the reader of the style and thematic concerns of The Waterworks.

Let us be fair to E. L. Doctorow. In Drinks Before Dinner, he has tried to do something incomparably more ambitious than any new American play has done in years—he has tried to put the whole case against civilization in a nutshell. That is impressive by definition: while our cleverer young playwrights have been agonizing over the harmful effects of the media, or how secrets corrupt the nuclear family, Doctorow has looked at the map of our moral world, and unerringly pointed one fat finger at its capi...

[Loon Lake] is E. L. Doctorow's first novel since Ragtime, the seventies' smash hit in American fiction. Unlike its predecessor, the new book has both a hero and a second banana…. (p. 105) Joe [the hero] and Warren [the second banana] aren't mere symptoms or props or proofs—evidence of social injustice or American fatuity or the meaninglessness of history. And this sets them off sharply from Father, Mother, Younger Brother, J. P. Morgan, Houdini, and the others—even...

Time defeats us in two ways: it bullies us by pursuit, and it mocks us with evasion. We grow older; we are consumed. Yet, at the same time, the events that practice on our mortality, that "do us in," are themselves disordered, senseless, refusing to cohere. E. L. Doctorow is a remarkable novelist precisely because he confronts the mockery of time directly and attempts to master it with footwork fancier and more playful…. [In] The Book of Daniel Doctorow already demonstrated his preoccup...

[Drinks Before Dinner] originated not in an idea or a character or a story but in a sense of heightened language, a way of talking. It was not until I had the sound of it in my ear that I thought about saying something. The language preceded the intention. It's possible that the voice the writer discovers may only be the hallucination of his own force of will; nevertheless, the process of making something up is best experienced as fortuitous, unplanned, exploratory. You write to find out what it is y...

Generally, the reviews of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime have all been superlative, praising the novel as a rare evocation of American history and imagined life during the critical years before and during World War I…. Against the panorama of this era, with all of its turbulence and fury, an imagined family seeks its way toward the dreams of a peculiar brand of human achievement and ultimately to the ironic discovery of the dissolution of its dreams. At every level, Doctorow's narrative is co...

In the following review, Wutz outlines the elements of The Waterworks and considers its place in Doctorow's oeuvre.

[In] "Loon Lake," Mr. Doctorow has fashioned a world of mirrors, a fascinating, tantalizing novel in which nearly every image or episode has its counterpart somewhere else in the book. Even the Old-Leftish ideology, which forms a link of sorts between the earlier novels, is reflected from so many angles as to be practically dissolved. Like "Ragtime," "Loon Lake" evokes a period in our history: in this case the 1930's…. (p. 1)

My complaint is not that [Loon Lake] is a bad, awful, commercial, exploitive book. Those books come labeled—we recognize them in an instant. This book is more deeply and subtly exploitive. It appears to concern itself with decades and figures of the past, with the Depression, with working conditions, labor strife, violence…. It appears by the act of imitation to want to pay respects to writers of the past: Dos Passos comes first to mind. It appears to be seeking a style: at any rate it abandon...

In the following brief review, Hutchings outlines the elements of The Waterworks and considers its literary predecessors.

Doctorow's treatment of [the scenes and characters in Loon Lake] is at once traditional, odd and dissonantly beautiful, like a chorus of the blues played by Dizzy Gillespie. (p. 285) The last paragraph of the book, written in a kind of semi-lyric computerese, outlines the rest of Joseph Paterson Bennett's career—as soldier, as deputy assistant director of Central Intelligence, as chairman of this and trustee of that, as tycoon and, in the book's powerful concluding words, as �...

Everything about Doctorow's career to date indicates that he considers the novel a vehicle for social and moral commentary as well as an art form which should stretch the author's resources to their limits. But success on the Ragtime scale in America almost automatically makes it more difficult for a writer to take himself seriously, partly because other, less successful writers begin to discount him…. This is not a metaphysical problem. It's one of the facts of life and writing ...

The following review provides a brief report of the contents and concerns of World's Fair.

In the following review, Williams outlines the conflict and theme of Welcome to Hard Times.

[E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime and Robert Altman's Nashville explore] the way the private, unpublicized lives of our political and intellectual heroes interact with the fantasies of the American public; both Doctorow and Altman emphasize a singular popular form—ragtime and country music—as the variable that brings together our leaders and the public whose subconscious dreams they project…. [In] Ragtime Doctorow employs an unusual "March of Time"-type narrative tha...

In the following review, Brooks provides a sketch of the plot, characters and ideas in Big as Life.

Rereading Ragtime, I find that most of the initial impact has been blunted: Literary shocks are subject to the law of diminishing returns. I find, too, a certain vacuity of literary display. What once seemed verbally startling is now revealed as mostly tinsel. But that Doctorow was superior to most of his American fellow-novelists in his concentration on fiction as form, not as a vehicle for special or ethnic preaching, is made very clear. A rereading of Welcome to Hard Times and The Book of Daniel has conf...

For me, Loon Lake had its moments. But the style—some of it written in a kind of computer-printout blank verse, with side trips into Zen Japan—kept getting in the way. I think Doctorow is trying for a certain kind of irony, a saturnine, perhaps even prophetic, view of both the poor and rich in America, their intertwining and colliding destinies. But the balance goes awry. It could be that Doctorow shares too much with his hero, a certain over-respect for the super-rich; F. W. Bennett, a rather...

In the following review, Beards provides a brief survey of the stories collected in Lives of the Poets.

Come back, Dorothy Parker, nothing is forgiven. Not by Mr. Doctorow anyway, and he himself seems badly in need of shriving if not of absolution, himself. When intellectual New Yorkers set out to beat their breasts they give themselves, and us, the full treatment, a real work-out. And so it is in Drinks Before Dinner…. This one will shrivel the ice cubes in that li'l ole highball before your hostess can recall herself to her social obligations and offer to freshen it up for you. The trouble was...

E. L. Doctorow, in Ragtime, urges social justice in a more or less moving and persuasive way, but he is not concerned with true morality. After talk of policemen, evil capitalists, and strikebreakers, there is a scene in which the anarchist Emma Goldman gives a massage to the now naked, famous beauty Evelyn Nesbit, while a character known only as Mother's Younger Brother peeks from a closet. It's a scene filled, naturally, with prurient interest and filled, also, with a strong and convincing t...