EL Doctorow: 'He showed how a great literary imagination can illuminate the present through the prism of the past'

He was a a bestselling novelist who wrote serious fiction. He radiated curiosity and intelligence. Mark Lawson pays tribute to a great American original

EL Doctorow in Paris in 1990 Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis

Mark Lawson

Wednesday 22 July 2015  The Guardian

The American writer EL Doctorow, who died on Tuesday in New York at the age of 84, represented a series of paradoxes. He was a committed literary modernist who almost never depicted his own times. Despite being a longtime academic whose photograph would perfectly have illustrated a dictionary entry for “professor”, his sure populist touch resulted in his novels becoming bestsellers and being adapted into Hollywood movies and a Broadway musical. Yet, although these works brought him unusually broad audiences for a serious novelist, Doctorow never quite achieved the fame of his contemporaries such as Philip Roth and John Updike.

Doctorow also published far fewer books than Norman Mailer, Updike and Roth, his relatively short shelf partly due to a slow, meticulous composition not restricted to professional texts. One of the best anecdotes about the drawbacks of living with a writer is Doctorow’s account of being asked one morning by his wife, Helen, to scribble a note to the school explaining why one of their three children had missed lessons the previous day. As the author began and then abandoned various opening sentences – rejecting, “On Monday morning, my daughter …” because it sounded like a legal deposition and “Following a bout of …” for being pseudo-forensic – the child’s exasperated mother grabbed the pen and notebook and wrote a short sentence explaining that the child had been absent due to a brief cold

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