![]() Even the most minor, transient characters sense the current passing through the body politic, as in this description of an immigrant family being photographed in their tenement home by Jacob Riis: “After he left, the family, not daring to move, remained in the position in which they had been photographed. It’s manifested in the new mass production of automobiles, labor unrest, Polar exploration, a Negro driving a car that he himself owns, and, of course, in Harry Houdini’s literal escape from ever-more elaborate restraints. But change - both liberation and new forms of oppression - is in the air. Its characters make their way through the first decade like Doctorow’s car in the fog, peering into the darkness, propelled by personal necessity, with only the faintest sense of the hairpin turns and uncharted terrain they are traversing. ![]() "Ragtime," published in 1975, was about the birth of that terrifying 20th century. ![]() “The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.” And as profoundly, he demonstrated that literature need not be an elite or frivolous pursuit. I’d heard of the McCarthy hearings, even of the Red Scare of the 1920s, but in Daniel’s frantic rage and the fearless, form-jarring prose through which it was conveyed, Doctorow made me comprehend how the struggle we thought was uniquely ours had been thrumming and morphing for generations. I entered college that year, already a veteran anti-war protestor, but appallingly ignorant of that long, volatile stretch of American history between the Civil War and Vietnam. Doctorowĭoctorow’s "Book of Daniel" was published in 1971, 20 years after the espionage trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on which it’s based. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century. Or at least change the people who read, compel them to look up from the page and apply the insights ignited there. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”įor me, the late novelist was a headlight, illuminating the way in which literature could not just reflect the world, but change it. Doctorow’s observation that, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. Most writers I know have at some point taken solace from E.L.
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