E. L. Doctorow: Three Early Novels (LOA #403): Welcome to Hard Times / The Book of Daniel / Ragtime

For the first time in one volume, three brilliantly artful novels that reinvented the genre of historical fiction.Inaugurating Library of America’s authoritative edition of the works of E. L. Doctorow, this volume gathers three novels that announced a major new voice in American fiction, and offered profoundly inventive and unflinching visions of American history.Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Doctorow’s impeccably crafted debut book, revisits romantic myths of the American frontier. Reduced to smoldering ruins by a sociopathic outlaw, the little town of Hard Times, somewhere in the Dakota Territory of the 1870s, finds new hope in Blue, who may be the last good man.The Book of Daniel (1971) finds Doctorow excavating the political anxieties of the Cold War. Daniel Isaacson struggles to make sense of the inheritance he has received from his parents, loosely modelled on convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, assembling a fractured narrative that blends memory and personal confession with historical inquiry and judgment.Ragtime (1975)—a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award—brings Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini and other historical characters into Doctorow's fictional world, giving us a vibrant, expansive, darkly playful panorama of early twentieth-century America. Together, these three novels chart the emergence of a writer who reshaped the possibilities of historical fiction and redefined how American stories can be told. Read more