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:

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Random House Reader's Circle Books

Publication Order of Best American Short Stories Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

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.

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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.