E. L. Doctorow

Doctorow, whose immigrant grandparents named his father after Edgar Allan Poe, grew up in the Bronx, studied philosophy at Kenyon College under the poet John Crowe Ransom, and worked for years as a book editor in New York, first at New American Library, then running Dial Press, where he championed writers including Norman Mailer and James Baldwin before turning to fiction full time.

The Book of Daniel, a novel refracted through the Rosenberg espionage case, established his method of running invented characters alongside real historical ones; Ragtime pushed the technique further, weaving Houdini, J. P. Morgan, and Emma Goldman into a turn-of-the-century mosaic that became a massive bestseller, then a film and a Broadway musical.

He taught for decades at New York University, continued writing historical fiction into his eighties, and died in New York in 2015.