E.L. Doctorow dies at 84; award-wining author of ‘Ragtime’

E.L. Doctorow, the renowned author of “Ragtime� and many other works of historical fiction and nonfiction, has died. He was 84.

He died Tuesday at a hospital in New York of complications from lung cancer, his son, Richard Doctorow, told the Los Angeles Times.

Doctrow’s books included “Ragtime,� which was adapted into a film and a Broadway musical, and “World’s Fair,� which won the National Book Award in 1986.

A January 2014 Los Angeles Times book review of his most recent novel, “Andrew’s Brain,� described him as operating in the shadow of the Transcendentalists, “a romantic, a true believer — in the myth of America as a shining city, despite its various and ongoing failures to live up to its better self.�

Times’ book critic David L. Ulin has described Doctorow as the “Lon Chaney of American fiction� for the variety of characters and genres he covered.

Doctorow’s first book, 1960’s “Welcome to Hard Times� was a Western, and his 1966 follow-up “Big as Life� borrowed from science fiction. “The Book of Daniel,� published in 1971, intersects history and personality, “the drama of America, its brilliant promise and its awful failings, in which private matters play out against a broader world,� Ulin wrote. “Ragtime� is about a nation struggling with modernity.

Shortly after news of Doctorow’s death became public, President Obama called the author “one of America’s greatest novelists.�

“His books taught me much, and he will be missed,� Obama said on Twitter.

Born in 1931 and raised in the Bronx, N.Y., Doctorow was a broadly American author, writing novels that operated as what he called “immense social documents,� taking on the messy ambiguities of the national mythosphere.

“Ragtime,� which four decades after its initial publication remains his best-known work, weaves historical figures such as architect Stanford White, White’s lover, Evelyn Nesbit, and anarchist Emma Goldman into the fabric of its fiction to create a three-dimensional pastiche of turn-of-the-20th-century America.

A novelist, Doctorow told the Times in 2006, “partakes of many identities. People say to me, ‘A lot of your novels take place in the past. Are you a historical novelist?’ I don’t think of myself that way, but if you want to call me that, go ahead. Then someone will say, ‘There’s a certain political quality to a lot of your work. Would you call yourself a political novelist?’ And I’ll say, ‘I’ve never thought of myself as a political novelist, but if that suits you, why not?’ And then someone will say, ‘You’re a Jewish novelist’ -- and yes, I guess that’s true, too. So I accept any kind of identity. I’m willing to participate in all of them, as long as none claims to be an exhaustive interpretation.�

In addition to his son, Doctorow is survived by his wife, Helen Setzer; daughters Jenny Doctorow Fe-Bornstein and Caroline Doctorow Gatewood; and four grandchildren.

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