EL Doctorow, author of ‘Ragtime,’ dies in New York at 84

On Doctorow’s official website it says “Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction and the presidentially-conferred National Humanities Medal”.

The Random House Publishing Group who were the publisher of his most of the novel gave no further details but the New York Times, citing Richard the writer’s son, said the popular author died in New York on Tuesday of complications from lung cancer. “And this was entirely unplanned”. Doctorow would go on to describe him as “our greatest bad writer”.

He published his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, in 1960 following a stint as a script reader for movie studio Columbia Pictures.

Obama has called Doctorow’s Ragtime a personal favourite.

A Guardian reviewer called his 1971 book, The Book of Daniel – his fictionalised account of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during the Cold War – a “masterpiece”.

“Ragtime” in 1975 served up a Dickensian stew of Gilded Age New York, mixing historical figures such as J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman with invented ones.

Billy Bathgate, one his works published in 1989, tells the story of an impoverished 15-year-old Irish American living in The Bronx.

“The March” depicted William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas from the vantage points of Sherman himself, a mixed-race freed slave girl, a brilliant but dispassionate battlefield surgeon, two Confederate prisoners who adopt various disguises and others.

The cast of the Broadway play “Ragtime” performs a scene from the play during the 1998 Tony Award Ceremonies at Radio City Music Hall in New York, June 7. He also held teaching posts at NYU, Princeton, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Utah.

In addition to his son, E.L.is survived by his wife, Helen Setzer, daughters Jenny and Caroline, along with four grandchildren.