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“... In his historical novels, E.L. Doctorow has written about ragtime and the Rosenbergs, about mobsters and world fairs. His most recent novel deals with one of the most fraught subjects in US history: the long march of General William Tecumseh Sherman in the final months of the Civil War. The election of 1864 was a referendum on whether the Union should fight to achieve total victory or seek a negotiated peace, which would almost certainly have required the Union to rescind its emancipation of the slaves ...”

“... The American historical novelist E.L. Doctorow has spoken of the adventure of his process of composition, of the excitement of not knowing where he is going to end up. For a reader, too, the feeling of being searchingly led forward is one of the pleasures offered by his fiction. But another impression it gives is that the environment being explored comes ready structured ...”

“... The jacket informs us that Loon Lake is ‘a novel by E.L. Doctorow Author of RAGTIME’. Ragtime must have been a hard act to follow. In its day (1975), it was the most highly paid-for novel ever. Doctorow had well over two million dollars in subsidiary-rights advances and a whole generation of readers were introduced by it to the meaning of the word ‘hype ...”

“... I take the following details from Current Biography, July 1976. Edgar L. Doctorow was born in New York City on 6 January 1931 to David R. and Rose Doctorow, whom he has described as ‘old-fashioned social democrats’. His grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants from Russia ...”

“... gossip shared behind that façade. Appearance, the public face, is never a simple hypocrisy. E.L. Doctorow once remarked that appearances are all we have, so we should treat them with great care. We are often told that privacy is disappearing, that the most intimate secrets are open to public probing. But the reality is the opposite: what is effectively ...”

“... of exposition. I wish that Collins had appended ‘In Pursuit of Guzman’ to the novel. E.L. Doctorow’s last three novels have returned to the period of his boyhood, the Thirties. Each features boy heroes and mingles daydreams of adolescence with the adult disciplines of Modernist fiction. Names are made to carry important meaning in ...”

“... Here’s something out of the quaint past, a man reading a book,’ remarks E.L. Doctorow’s narrator as he rides the New York subway. The other passengers in the subway are not readers but listeners, hooked to their earphones and tape-players, ‘listening their way back from literacy’. And before literacy? ‘The world worked in a different system of perception, voices were disembodied, tales were told ...”

“... extremely important literary document, elegantly written and impeccably argued’ (E.L. Doctorow). Norton should distribute little blue sachets of salt, like the ones you used to get in packets of crisps, with this volume, but it’s touching to see Epstein’s pals rallying round. What literary agent, or CEO of AOL Time Warner, could expect such ...”

“... on Monocle and the New York Times, and became editor of the Nation in 1978. Kurt Vonnegut, E.L. Doctorow, Studs Terkel and Tom Wicker are among the admirers quoted on the dust-jacket; and, as if that weren’t enough, Navasky himself twinkles out on the back flap in a checked open-neck shirt, a beard, wiry glasses, and an engine-driver’s cap which ...”

“... Among his teachers were Oakley Hall, a successful writer of adventure and western novels, and E.L. Doctorow, who was writing his best novel during Ford’s years in Irvine, The Book of Daniel (1971), which should have won all the major awards his later novels did win. With his MFA, awarded in 1970, Ford entered fully a new world far removed from the declining ...”