Doctorow, E.L.

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born January 6, 1931 in New York. After serving as a corporal in the Army, Doctorow became a reader for a motion picture company and was inspired to begin his career as a writer. His works include Ragtime (1975), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was also adapted into a 1981 film, nominated for eight Academy awards. Another of Doctorow’s works includes Billy Bathgate, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the Academy of Arts and Letters for “the best novel of the previous five-year period”.