July 21 in New York, died an American writer Edgar Lawrence Doctorow. Author of “Ragtime” and “Billy Bathgate” was 84 years old.
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in 1931 in New York’s Bronx family music shop owner David Doctorow and his wife, Rose Levin – and the writer’s mother and father were from families at the time who left the Jewish settlements in the Russian Empire. Parents romantically named the child after the great poet Edgar Allan Poe, and, as it turned out, it has paid off – his first artistic experiments Doctorow began to publish a schoolboy.
The most famous product of Doctorow – novel “Ragtime “, released in 1975, and six years later Milos Forman filmed with James Cagney in the lead role. Doctorow himself allowed himself to speak about his very famous book, with some disdain. He said that after his previous novel “The Book of Daniel” (there is told about the family of the Rosenbergs, transferred to the Soviet Union secret nuclear technology for “maintaining the equality of forces in the world” and executed for it) critics accused of excessive complexity, he set himself the task “write a book that will be read by mechanics.” And “Ragtime” really read mechanics, as well as all the others – became the best-selling novel, and in 1976 received the National Book Award.
Action “Ragtime” is set on the eve of the First World War II. At the center of the story prosperous family “upper middle class”, around which in bizarre combinations, like the strange intertwining musical phrases in the then popular Ragtime Scott Joplin, grouped characters, symbolizing time – fictional and real. “Black musician” and very specific magician Harry Houdini, “a Jewish immigrant” and well-known tycoon JP Morgan – and so on. Central to reproduce Doctorow ‘rumble of time “, and this hum for him – rather, the sound of the theatrical orchestra (by the way, in 1998, the novel set musical), which brings historical celebrities and people” just “in some interludes, then to be replaced the thunder of war.
We “Ragtime” was especially popular also because of its translation (it came out in the magazine “Foreign Literature” in 1978 – in the novel is described by race discrimination and other inequalities in America, so it was considered revealing the Western way of life, that is fit to print) was made by Vasily Aksenov. Many people have found that the “most fashionable writer in Moscow and Leningrad” took this job because of his love for jazz that is so brilliantly inscribed into the fabric of the novel, but the attentive reader of both authors can easily notice how much unites them – in including the approach to the description of time as a mixture of personal impressions and massive die.
In 1989, Doctorow released “Billy Bathgate” – another novel, whose name is on everyone’s lips ( largely due to the adaptation of Dustin Hoffman in the role of the famous gangster Dutch Schultz). By this time the writer was already one of the most award-winning writers of America. By the end of his life Doctorow gathered compelling collection of awards – including Faulkner Award, a prize Library of Congress and the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts – but unlike many authors, whose “main” fame has died down, Doctorow is a writer who has found fans in new and new generations. How, in fact, at the very ragtime, to whom he dedicated his most famous book.
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