So I wrote down the date and I started, Dear Mrs. I was having my breakfast one morning when she appeared with her lunch box, her rain slicker, and everything, and she said, “I need an absence note for the teacher and the bus is coming in a few minutes.” She gave me a pad and a pencil even as a child she was very thoughtful. It was my daughter, Caroline, who was then in the second or third grade. What I was thinking of was a note I had to write to the teacher when one of my children missed a day of school. You once told me that the most difficult thing for a writer to write was a simple household note to someone coming to collect the laundry, or instructions to a cook. The fact that a large audience was listening during the interview seemed not to discomfit him in the slightest. His expression is perhaps quizzical (described by The New York Times as “elfin”), yet it is instantly apparent that a great deal of thought has been put into what he is about to say. Yet, though his voice is soft, it is distinctive and demands attention. They are included with their answers at the end of this interview.Īt first meeting, Doctorow gives the impression of being somewhat retiring in manner. ![]() After the flurry caused by this exchange had died down, the questions from the audience were more germane. A befuddled lady in the fifth row asked, “What made you write about the firestorm in Dresden?” With the patience of one who has taught at a number of institutions (Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, Yale Drama School, and New York University, among others), Doctorow politely informed his questioner that she probably had Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in mind, and that the Dresden firestorm had been done “so beautifully” there was little reason for anyone else to try. Actually, the first question from the floor suggested that the public forum might not be the best place for such an interview. ![]() The audience was invited to ask questions at the end of the formal interview. After a short introduction, Doctorow and his interviewer came out and sat facing each other in two chairs at center stage. An audience of about five hundred was on hand. Doctorow is one of the first in this series conducted in public-which it was, under the auspices of The Poetry Center, in the main auditorium of New York City’s famed cultural spa, the 92nd Street YMHA. This interview on the craft of writing with E. It was published to positive reviews in 1960.Interviewed by George Plimpton Issue 101, Winter 1986 He began it as a parody of western fiction, but it evolved to be a serious reclamation of the genre before he was finished. He returned to New York after his military service and took a job as a reader for a motion picture company, where he said he had to read so many Westerns that he was inspired to write what became his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. ![]() He served as a corporal in the signal corps, in Germany 195455 during the Allied occupation. After graduating with honors in 1952, he completed a year of graduate work in English drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the United States Army. He published his first literary effort, "The Beetle," in it, which he describes as a tale of etymological self-defamation inspired by my reading of Kafka.ĭoctorow attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where he studied with the poet and New Critic John Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions, and majored in philosophy. He attended city public grade schools and the Bronx High School of Science where, surrounded by mathematically gifted children, he fled to the office of the school literary magazine, Dynamo. Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of Rose (Levine) and David Richard Doctorow, second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent who named him after Edgar Allan Poe.
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