Billy Bathgate is Doctorow's seventh novel, and it has much in common with his earlier work. An interplay of history and fiction, for example, is also explored in his novels from The Book of Daniel (1971) to World's Fair (1985).

Even his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), mixes facts about the American frontier with elements of myth and imagination. The history of a specific decade has often been the background for Doctorow's more recent fiction. Ragtime, for example, includes a chronicle of events for the decade leading up to World War I. World's Fair, the novel immediately prior to Billy Bathgate, similarly focuses on a poor section of New York in the 1930s.

History and fiction are so tightly interwoven in his novels that Doctorow likes to claim that "all of my inventions are quite true."

Doctorow's previous works also include a number of experiments with the...