Order of E.L. Doctorow Books
E.L. Doctorow (1931-2015) was an American author, best known for the novel Ragtime. After growing up in New York, Doctorow attended Kenyon College in Ohio where he majored in philosophy and took part in theatre. He graduated with honours and then went to Columbia University where he finished a year of graduate work in English drama. At that point, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, with whom he served as a corporal in the signal corps in Germany during post-war Allied occupation. Doctorow went home to New York and read for a motion picture company. After reading so many westerns, he got the idea for his first novel (Welcome to Hard Times), which began as a parody, but ended up as a serious entry into the genre. Doctorow passed away in July 2015 of lung cancer, while living in New York City.
E.L. Doctorow became a published author in 1960 with the aforementioned novel Welcome to Hard Times. Below is a list of E.L. Doctorow’s books in order of when they were originally released:
(Descriptions lead to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases)
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Welcome to Hard Times | (1960) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Big As Life | (1966) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| The Book of Daniel | (1971) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Ragtime | (1975) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Drinks Before Dinner | (1979) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Loon Lake | (1980) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| American Anthem | (1982) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| World's Fair | (1985) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| The Waterworks | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| City of God | (2000) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| The March | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Homer & Langley | (2009) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Andrew's Brain | (2014) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Three Screenplays: Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake | (2003) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Sweet Land Stories | (2004) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Poems for Life: A Special Collection of Poetry | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| All the Time in the World | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Essays and Conversations | (1983) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992 | (1993) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Poets and Presidents: Selected Essays, 1977-92 | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Lamentation: 9/11 | (2002) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
| Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993-2006 | (2006) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com |
Publication Order of Literary Conversations Books
| Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges | (1969) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz | (1981) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Graham Greene | (1983) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Eudora Welty | (1985) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Walker Percy | (1985) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations With Isaac Bashevis Singer | (1985) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with William Styron | (1985) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Malcolm Cowley | (1986) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Lillian Hellman | (1986) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Tennessee Williams | (1986) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Ernest Hemingway | (1986) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter | (1987) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Truman Capote: Conversations | (1987) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Flannery O'Connor | (1987) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Peter Taylor | (1987) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Arthur Miller | (1987) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut | (1988) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Edward Albee | (1988) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Erskine Caldwell | (1988) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Norman Mailer | (1988) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Robert Graves | (1989) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates | (1989) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Shelby Foote | (1989) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Robertson Davies | (1989) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with James Baldwin | (1989) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with John Gardner | (1990) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Richard Wilbur | (1990) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Tom Wolfe | (1990) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Raymond Carver | (1990) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Eugene O'Neill | (1990) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Reynolds Price | (1991) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Bernard Malamud | (1991) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer | (1991) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Nikki Giovanni | (1992) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations With Thornton Wilder | (1992) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Robert Coles | (1992) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher | (1992) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| More Conversations with Walker Percy | (1993) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Richard Wright | (1993) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Paul Bowles | (1993) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Amiri Baraka | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Toni Morrison | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Saul Bellow | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Henry Miller | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Ernest Gaines | (1995) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Ralph Ellison | (1995) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Chester Himes | (1995) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Susan Sontag | (1995) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Ishmael Reed | (1995) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Derek Walcott | (1996) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| More Conversations with Eudora Welty | (1996) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop | (1996) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Pauline Kael | (1996) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with V. S. Naipaul | (1997) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with N. Scott Momaday | (1997) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Chinua Achebe | (1997) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston | (1998) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Denise Levertov | (1998) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations With William Faulkner | (1999) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with E. L. Doctorow | (1999) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations With John Fowles | (1999) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Salman Rushdie | (2000) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with William S. Burroughs | (2000) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko | (2000) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Chaim Potok | (2001) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Richard Ford | (2001) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Christopher Isherwood | (2001) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Mary Gordon | (2002) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Jim Harrison | (2002) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Clarence Major | (2002) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Margaret Walker | (2002) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Erica Jong | (2002) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Elie Wiesel: Conversations | (2002) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Joseph Brodsky: Conversations | (2003) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Rita Dove | (2003) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald | (2003) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks | (2003) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Stanley Kaufmann | (2003) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Gloria Naylor | (2004) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Audre Lorde | (2004) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Ray Bradbury | (2004) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations With John le Carré | (2004) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Isaac Asimov | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Don DeLillo | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Gore Vidal | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Robert Penn Warren | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Jack Kerouac | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Thomas McGuane | (2006) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Larry Brown | (2007) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Sonia Sanchez | (2007) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Wendell Berry | (2007) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Leon Forrest | (2007) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro | (2008) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
+ Show All Books in this Series | ||||
Publication Order of Random House Reader's Circle Books
| Lives of the Poets | (1984) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Billy Bathgate | (1989) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Tender at the Bone | (1998) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Anthropology of an American Girl | (2003) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| The White Garden | (2009) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Juliet | (2010) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| The Wives of Henry Oades | (2010) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Delta Girls | (2010) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| The Pull of the Moon | (2010) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| The Definition of Wind | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| When We Were Friends | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Game of Secrets | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| The Homecoming of Samuel Lake | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| Invisible | (2012) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
| The Lullaby of Polish Girls | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon.com | ||
+ Show All Books in this Series | ||||
Publication Order of The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures Books
Publication Order of Anthologies
+ Click to View all Anthologies
Monthly Newsletter!
Twice per month we send out a book newsletter with recommendations and more. Subscribe below or see the newsletter archives to see what to expect.
Notes: Welcome to Hard Times was also published as Bad Man from Bodie. Poems for Life also contains poems by Allen Ginsberg, David Mamet, Tom Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Sondheim, Kurt Vonnegut, Elie Wisel and others.
If You Like E.L. Doctorow Books, You’ll Love…
E.L. Doctorow Synopsis: Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow begins in 1906 at the home of an affluent American family in New Rochelle, New York. One regular Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini crashes his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And then, the line between reality and fantasy vanishes. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the story, crossing paths with Doctorow’s imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
