What do you think?
Rate this book
Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006
E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March . Now here are Doctorow’s rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In Creationists , Doctorow considers creativity in its many from the literary (Melville and Mark Twain) to the comic (Harpo Marx) to the cosmic (Genesis and Einstein). As he wrestles with the subjects that have teased and fired his own imagination, Doctorow affirms the idea that “we know by what we create.”
Just what is Melville doing in Moby-Dick ? And how did The Adventures of Tom Sawyer impel Mark Twain to radically rewrite what we know as Huckleberry Finn ? Can we ever trust what novelists say about their own work? How could Franz Kafka have written a book called Amerika without ever leaving Europe? In posing such questions, Doctorow grapples with literary creation not as a critic or as a scholar–but as one working writer frankly contemplating the work of another. It’s a perspective that affords him both protean grace and profound insight.
Among the essays collected here are Doctorow’s musings on the very different Spanish Civil War novels of Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux; a candid assessment of Edgar Allan Poe as our “greatest bad writer”; a bracing analysis of the story of Genesis in which God figures as the most complex and riveting character. Whether he is considering how Harpo Marx opened our eyes to surrealism, the haunting photos with which the late German writer W. G. Sebald illustrated his texts, or the innovations of such
literary icons as Heinrich von Kleist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sinclair Lewis, Doctorow is unfailingly generous, shrewd, attentive, surprising, and precise.
In examining the creative works of different times and disciplines, Doctorow also reveals the source and nature of his own artistry. Rich in aphorism and anecdote, steeped in history and psychology, informed by a lifetime of reading and writing, Creationists opens a magnificent window into one of the great creative minds of our time.
Just what is Melville doing in Moby-Dick ? And how did The Adventures of Tom Sawyer impel Mark Twain to radically rewrite what we know as Huckleberry Finn ? Can we ever trust what novelists say about their own work? How could Franz Kafka have written a book called Amerika without ever leaving Europe? In posing such questions, Doctorow grapples with literary creation not as a critic or as a scholar–but as one working writer frankly contemplating the work of another. It’s a perspective that affords him both protean grace and profound insight.
Among the essays collected here are Doctorow’s musings on the very different Spanish Civil War novels of Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux; a candid assessment of Edgar Allan Poe as our “greatest bad writer”; a bracing analysis of the story of Genesis in which God figures as the most complex and riveting character. Whether he is considering how Harpo Marx opened our eyes to surrealism, the haunting photos with which the late German writer W. G. Sebald illustrated his texts, or the innovations of such
literary icons as Heinrich von Kleist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sinclair Lewis, Doctorow is unfailingly generous, shrewd, attentive, surprising, and precise.
In examining the creative works of different times and disciplines, Doctorow also reveals the source and nature of his own artistry. Rich in aphorism and anecdote, steeped in history and psychology, informed by a lifetime of reading and writing, Creationists opens a magnificent window into one of the great creative minds of our time.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published September 19, 2006
33 people are currently reading
205 people want to read
About the author
E.L. Doctorow
101 books1,158 followersHistory based known novels of American writer Edgar Laurence Doctorow. His works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN Saul Bellow Award given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American Literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
November 10, 2023
This set of essays was never less than enlightening—sometimes (as with the final essays on Einstein and the titular "creationists" of the atom and thermo-nuclear bombs) quite surprisingly so. Though some of these essays aim for the continent (Malraux, Kafka, Sebald, and Heinrich von Kleist—all excellent), for the most part we stick to North America, avoiding Mexico, Canada, and, alas, women writers. But Doctorow is inspired in his treatments of Arthur Miller, Hemingway, and, strangely, Harpo Marx, and the essay on Melville's Moby Dick is itself worth the price of admission. Too brief by half, tho, this book.
September 1, 2025
"It can be a dangerous profession, storytelling. If actuarial figures of writers' life spans worldwide were calculated, ... taking into account the jailings, the deportations, the executions, the disappearances, as well as the humdrum deaths from malnutrition and neglect, you would not want your son or daughter to become a writer." pxii
I own a hardback copy of CREATIONISTS by E. L. Doctorow. Originally, I got it as a potential writing resource.
These essays provide an interesting perspective through which to observe some of the US's favorite modern writers and works. A little dry, but fascinating.
Often, Doctorow includes in his discussions of books and authors the history occurring during their personal and professional lives, and inviting consideration of how one fed into the other.
This will be a great read for people who enjoy modern literature and are interested in that era's major writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and the like. It will also be good for readers interested in twentieth century history. It is, I think, of limited value as an instructional text for contemporary writers, except perhaps for those writing litfic.
I recommend the audiobook read by the author for this one.
Part of my kill-my-tbr project, in which I'm reading all my physical, unread books, which number around one thousand!
I own a hardback copy of CREATIONISTS by E. L. Doctorow. Originally, I got it as a potential writing resource.
These essays provide an interesting perspective through which to observe some of the US's favorite modern writers and works. A little dry, but fascinating.
Often, Doctorow includes in his discussions of books and authors the history occurring during their personal and professional lives, and inviting consideration of how one fed into the other.
This will be a great read for people who enjoy modern literature and are interested in that era's major writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and the like. It will also be good for readers interested in twentieth century history. It is, I think, of limited value as an instructional text for contemporary writers, except perhaps for those writing litfic.
I recommend the audiobook read by the author for this one.
Part of my kill-my-tbr project, in which I'm reading all my physical, unread books, which number around one thousand!
July 26, 2019
Why is there such a strong anti-intellectual strain in America? America seems forever fixated on emotion, and that fixation discourages deepening wisdom. The hurry to do something makes the delay of developing a philosophy almost sinful.
It's just a hypothesis, and books like the Creationists try to slow time down, briefly, to offer testimonials in favour of American intellectual life.
It's not an easy task, but Doctorow succeeds by giving it to us in all its messiness. At heart this book is about the act of artistic creation (anti-evolutionists were bound to be disappointed). It's a life outside of life, a choice that means everything, in ways other choices do not.
To be reminded that Americans can claim that messy experimental novel Moby Dick; that we can claim the mystic and reclusive Poe; that we've a history of pushing up against racism even as we seemed to accept it (as imperfect as that effort has been), this matters because it offers some identity we can point to beyond the surface level awareness, full of misinformation, we seem unable to escape.
Having a literary tradition is not icing; it's the feast, the wine, the beauty of life. The rest is as Austen said, busy nothings.
Let's have more of these books. And a tradition worth reflecting on.
If you're reading this, I suppose it continues with you and me. Welcome, have a seat.
A+
It's just a hypothesis, and books like the Creationists try to slow time down, briefly, to offer testimonials in favour of American intellectual life.
It's not an easy task, but Doctorow succeeds by giving it to us in all its messiness. At heart this book is about the act of artistic creation (anti-evolutionists were bound to be disappointed). It's a life outside of life, a choice that means everything, in ways other choices do not.
To be reminded that Americans can claim that messy experimental novel Moby Dick; that we can claim the mystic and reclusive Poe; that we've a history of pushing up against racism even as we seemed to accept it (as imperfect as that effort has been), this matters because it offers some identity we can point to beyond the surface level awareness, full of misinformation, we seem unable to escape.
Having a literary tradition is not icing; it's the feast, the wine, the beauty of life. The rest is as Austen said, busy nothings.
Let's have more of these books. And a tradition worth reflecting on.
If you're reading this, I suppose it continues with you and me. Welcome, have a seat.
A+
December 18, 2009
If you pick up this book expecting E.L. Doctorow to weigh in on “intelligent design” or other anti-Darwinian controversies you’ll be disappointed. It’s a book of essays mostly about literature: Poe, Melville, Twain, Malraux, Kleist, Kafka, et al. Doctorow calls it “a modest celebration of the creative act.”
Creationists is a whimsical title; Doctorow doesn’t have much in common with the creationists who use the Bible to make an end run around science. But he does give his collection a biblical structure: It begins with an essay on the book of Genesis and ends with an apocalypse, an essay on the threat of nuclear holocaust. And he does sense that creativity has a fundamental mysteriousness about it. As he puts it, “the act of writing, when it is going well, seems no more than the dutiful secretarial response to a silent dictation.”
This idea of the seeming autonomy of the imagination gets its strongest expression not in an essay on literature but in one on science, “Einstein: Seeing the Unseen.” “Einstein’s theory of relativity was an arduous work of self-expression no less than that of a great writer or painter,” Doctorow says, referring to “the occasion of lightning clarity when that formula E=mc2¬ wrote itself in his brain, the moment of creative crisis, the eureka moment.”
On the analogy of the cosmic creative moment known as the Big Bang, Doctorow calls this “the Little Bang of the writer’s or scientist’s inspiration,” in which, in the writer’s case, “from the slightest bit of material a whole novelistic world is created.”
And he notes that “the writers of the ancient texts, the sacred texts of our religions” were “so awed … by the mystery of their own creative process” that they “attributed the Little Bang of their own written cosmologies … to God.”
From Welcome to Hard Times to The March, and especially in such novels as The Book of Daniel, Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, Doctorow’s own creativity has been fired by American history, by the West, the Civil War, the Cold War, by gangsters and rebels and immigrants. So some of the most provocative things he has to say in these essays are about the writer’s relationship to America – or in the case of Franz Kafka, to Amerika, a novel that foundered because Kafka’s claustrophobic Old World imagination was stymied by the immensity of the country. As Doctorow says, Kafka “held his book together as long as he’d ignored the true scale of the American continent,” but “the minute he tried to fold our vast openness into his conceit he was finished.”
But even American writers come to grief. Harriet Beecher Stowe may have touched the American conscience with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but Doctorow faults the book for “the implicit racism of Stowe’s stereotypes” of black people. “It is an indication of how tortuous is the moral progress of a culture where even the religiously driven protest, the aesthetically organized act of moral intellect, assumes the biases of the system it would overthrow.”
And Stowe is not the only transgressor when it comes to racial stereotyping that ironically works against the author’s message. Doctorow faults Mark Twain for letting Tom Sawyer take over the latter part of Huckleberry Finn – this is “terrible for American literature,” he says, not only because it turns a grown-up book into juvenile fiction, but also because it weakens the rapport between Huck and Jim. And the portrayal of Jim troubles him as much as Stowe’s stereotyping. Huck, Doctorow notes, “struggles against the white mores of his time to help the black man, Jim, escape from slavery, but it is Huck’s progenitor” – Twain himself – “who portrays Jim, in minstrelese, as a gullible black child-man led by white children.”
Doctorow rejects Hemingway’s famous assertion: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Instead, he says, “It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.” The essay on Moby-Dick may be the best in the book, exuberant cheerleading for Melville’s daunting masterpiece. “I don’t know any other writer in history as uncannily able to parody Shakespeare – at moments to be equal to him – with his monologues and scenes, but also to so successfully adopt the social structuring of his characters, their hierarchies of rank, comedy, and tragedy, their parallel relationships to those in the master’s plays,” he writes.
Throughout the book, Doctorow reminds us of the necessity of fiction, that “Stories … connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something of moral consequence. … Stories were the first repositories of human knowledge. They were as important to survival as a spear or a hoe.” This book is also a reminder, if one is needed, that good storytellers often make very good critics. The essays in Creationists are probing, subtle and smart. You might even say that they’re intelligently designed.
Creationists is a whimsical title; Doctorow doesn’t have much in common with the creationists who use the Bible to make an end run around science. But he does give his collection a biblical structure: It begins with an essay on the book of Genesis and ends with an apocalypse, an essay on the threat of nuclear holocaust. And he does sense that creativity has a fundamental mysteriousness about it. As he puts it, “the act of writing, when it is going well, seems no more than the dutiful secretarial response to a silent dictation.”
This idea of the seeming autonomy of the imagination gets its strongest expression not in an essay on literature but in one on science, “Einstein: Seeing the Unseen.” “Einstein’s theory of relativity was an arduous work of self-expression no less than that of a great writer or painter,” Doctorow says, referring to “the occasion of lightning clarity when that formula E=mc2¬ wrote itself in his brain, the moment of creative crisis, the eureka moment.”
On the analogy of the cosmic creative moment known as the Big Bang, Doctorow calls this “the Little Bang of the writer’s or scientist’s inspiration,” in which, in the writer’s case, “from the slightest bit of material a whole novelistic world is created.”
And he notes that “the writers of the ancient texts, the sacred texts of our religions” were “so awed … by the mystery of their own creative process” that they “attributed the Little Bang of their own written cosmologies … to God.”
From Welcome to Hard Times to The March, and especially in such novels as The Book of Daniel, Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, Doctorow’s own creativity has been fired by American history, by the West, the Civil War, the Cold War, by gangsters and rebels and immigrants. So some of the most provocative things he has to say in these essays are about the writer’s relationship to America – or in the case of Franz Kafka, to Amerika, a novel that foundered because Kafka’s claustrophobic Old World imagination was stymied by the immensity of the country. As Doctorow says, Kafka “held his book together as long as he’d ignored the true scale of the American continent,” but “the minute he tried to fold our vast openness into his conceit he was finished.”
But even American writers come to grief. Harriet Beecher Stowe may have touched the American conscience with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but Doctorow faults the book for “the implicit racism of Stowe’s stereotypes” of black people. “It is an indication of how tortuous is the moral progress of a culture where even the religiously driven protest, the aesthetically organized act of moral intellect, assumes the biases of the system it would overthrow.”
And Stowe is not the only transgressor when it comes to racial stereotyping that ironically works against the author’s message. Doctorow faults Mark Twain for letting Tom Sawyer take over the latter part of Huckleberry Finn – this is “terrible for American literature,” he says, not only because it turns a grown-up book into juvenile fiction, but also because it weakens the rapport between Huck and Jim. And the portrayal of Jim troubles him as much as Stowe’s stereotyping. Huck, Doctorow notes, “struggles against the white mores of his time to help the black man, Jim, escape from slavery, but it is Huck’s progenitor” – Twain himself – “who portrays Jim, in minstrelese, as a gullible black child-man led by white children.”
Doctorow rejects Hemingway’s famous assertion: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Instead, he says, “It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.” The essay on Moby-Dick may be the best in the book, exuberant cheerleading for Melville’s daunting masterpiece. “I don’t know any other writer in history as uncannily able to parody Shakespeare – at moments to be equal to him – with his monologues and scenes, but also to so successfully adopt the social structuring of his characters, their hierarchies of rank, comedy, and tragedy, their parallel relationships to those in the master’s plays,” he writes.
Throughout the book, Doctorow reminds us of the necessity of fiction, that “Stories … connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something of moral consequence. … Stories were the first repositories of human knowledge. They were as important to survival as a spear or a hoe.” This book is also a reminder, if one is needed, that good storytellers often make very good critics. The essays in Creationists are probing, subtle and smart. You might even say that they’re intelligently designed.
Read
February 5, 2009The brevity of these essays doesn't prevent E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime; The March, ****1/2 Selection Nov/Dec 2005) from writing with strength and intensity, though it does occasionally make it hard to feel deeply engaged by the material. Doctorow treats his fellow authors with uniform respect, one of several ways that he differs from writers who focus more on literary criticism. His approach is frequently both analytic and personal as he discusses the ways each creation is assembled and explores his own connections with it. Written clearly and with passion, this collection will please both casual readers and those who share Doctorow's deep and abiding love for great creations and fascination with their creators
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
December 6, 2009
A collection of Doctorow's incisive and thought-provoking essays on the art of fiction, with a brilliant introduction on writing in which he asks: "Why compose fiction when you could be devoting your life to your appetites? Why wrestle with a book when you could be amassing a fortune? Why write when you could be shooting someone?"
February 6, 2017
Beautifully written thoughts and analysis of several classic books and their authors. Can't say enough about his style - so fluid and thought-provoking. (He even makes me want to read Moby Dick - he's that convincing!). His ponderings are proof that reading a book with the intent to learn from it is wonderful. Reading a book with a group with this intent, is more so.
March 15, 2016
I greatly admire Doctorow, especially for his recent novel, March. But having this collection of his readings of other great and not-as-great authors gives a clear appreciation into the mind of a man who is himself a creationist.
May 19, 2017
Doctorow's essays on the creative process, as exemplified through the lives of writers, are lively and enlightening. Doctorow's prose is always elegant, his insights entertaining. I particularly liked the essays on Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Kafka's Amerika.
February 28, 2022
This book is an anthology of doctorow's occasional literary criticism/evaluations/observations regarding some of the famous works of American fiction. Those that stand out include his observations about Moby Dick, a work he considered novelistic rather than strictly a novel, owing to its digressions; in his analysis of what many would call the 'big three' among American 20th century novelists, i.e., Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, he notes that Fitzgerald seems to him the most unobtrusive writer because his prose, especially in The Great Gatsby, seems to be the least mannered, in other words, fiction that is elegant but retains the traditional American prose form whereas Faulkner and Hemingway are experimentalists. I agree. Ironically, the writer many would consider the most mannered is the least is borne out by the fact his writing draws the least attention to itself. Doctorow was often at odds with Updike since the former was critical of the latter for not taking an ideological stance in his novels while Upside would have argued that personal politics are the very thing a novelist should leave out of novels. Well, RIP to both of them.
July 26, 2021
Any one of the essays in this collection may prompt you to reread the book or the writer Doctorow has written about, or you may just marvel at what you hadn’t thought about that Doctorow has. Collectively, these essays explore creativity, in particular, how and why these writers - or the writer’s creation - stands out. As Doctorow writes in the opening to his essay, “W. G. Sebald,” at one time, “ . . . stories were presumed to be true simply by the fact of being told. . . . In the modern world deprived by rationalism and science of a divinely conceived universe . . . authors have had to reclaim the authority of their art by ruse.” Doctorow’s choices are his examples of those who succeeded in this reclaiming, even when the writer, such as Kafka, didn’t know how well he did.
The essays are relatively short and carefully written; thus, no excessive words to lose the reader’s interest. The power of Doctorow’s writing reached a high point with me with his last two essays, “Einstein: Seeing the Unseen” and “The Bomb.” 5 stars to both of these essays.
The essays are relatively short and carefully written; thus, no excessive words to lose the reader’s interest. The power of Doctorow’s writing reached a high point with me with his last two essays, “Einstein: Seeing the Unseen” and “The Bomb.” 5 stars to both of these essays.
November 10, 2023
I really like E.L. Doctorow, and this book of essays was no exception. I gained new insight on such authors as Herman Melville, Edgar Alan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. I also expanded my list of books I want to read. While most of the Doctorow's subjects are authors, he tosses in an essay on Einstein and another on the atomic bomb as well. I heartily recommend this book, not just to Doctorow fans, but to any reader, especially if that reader is also a writer.
December 12, 2019
Fascinating in its treatment of the personalities that created iconic works of literature, the prose style and incisive observations of a great American novelist make this a book well worth reading. It strangely lapses into an essay on the meaning of life in a nuclear age but that, too is well researched and constructed. A lot of substance for such a quick read.
July 23, 2018
First time reading Doctorow; his essays read like a lit-crit academic attempting to distill his discipline's high-brow ideas into quotidian language for the common man. The bland result satisfies no one, I imagine.
August 16, 2019
Not a humble guy that E.L. Doctorow. He is in turns dismissive, contemptuous, forgiving, fawning, appreciative, reductive, etc. He projects a certainty as to each author’s aim, feelings, and thoughts that seem a bit....well could Doctorow sometimes be wrong? For some of the criticisms I hope so.
December 12, 2022
A wonderful and eclectic collection of essays by one of the greatest American authors.
September 12, 2022
Loved these essays, and especially the one that links outsized, unapologetic flaws with literary genius. See Melville.
August 1, 2013
Doctorow's collection of essays--mostly on authors and their works, with a couple of notable exceptions--is a fine idea, but not very compellingly executed. In any individual essay, his tone might be described as lofty, or academic. But consistent as it is throughout the collection, it takes on a rather imperious, even arrogant cast. These are a series of judgemental (rather than critical) essays, most of them composed in the thoroughly presumptuous first-person plural. Do "we" really see these things this way? Yes, we do; E.L. Doctorow said so.
It's probably no coincidence, also, that Doctorow concerns himself almost exclusively with men in this collection (again, with a notable exception), and that when he does speak of women (even in the aforementioned exception) he does so dismissively. He tosses away Dickinson in half a sentence. I'm nor a particularly ardent fan of hers, but I have to admit that he never won me back over after that.
I can't recommend the book, but since I keep mentioning exceptions, let me carve one out. The penultimate essay on Einstein is very good. It's insightful and illuminating, and ironically tells more about the act of writing than any of the previous essays--all of which are devoted to literature. This essay also eschews the plural form of the first person which I mentioned above, and that helps immensely.
It's probably no coincidence, also, that Doctorow concerns himself almost exclusively with men in this collection (again, with a notable exception), and that when he does speak of women (even in the aforementioned exception) he does so dismissively. He tosses away Dickinson in half a sentence. I'm nor a particularly ardent fan of hers, but I have to admit that he never won me back over after that.
I can't recommend the book, but since I keep mentioning exceptions, let me carve one out. The penultimate essay on Einstein is very good. It's insightful and illuminating, and ironically tells more about the act of writing than any of the previous essays--all of which are devoted to literature. This essay also eschews the plural form of the first person which I mentioned above, and that helps immensely.
May 24, 2014
This book is a fun and stimulating rummage through a variety of storytellers - mostly 19th and 20th century Americans - as a collection of short essays emphasizing their contributions as well as their short-comings. Doctorow's is a shrewd, learned eye, and he is decisive and forceful in his pronouncements. While I respect the insight of his gray-haired eminence, he upset me in a few parts of this book with his tone and dismissiveness of certain elements of particular authors' work that I would defend (I mean he really takes Poe to the woodshed before dusting him off and giving him back a seat at the table). But such is the nature of a deeper conversation about books and what they mean because disagreement forces us to re-evaluate our values and interpretations, giving our literary notions more nuance and ultimately strength.
August 27, 2015
The title is maybe just there to get your attention. It's not a religious diatribe. However, he does open with an essay on Genesis, namely the story problem in Genesis: What story could these authors come up that would explain their world? And he closes with an essay on the possibility of a nuclear holocaust - which fits with our modern version of Judgment Day. But despite these touches of religion in the book ends, all Doctorow claims he means by "creationists" are those who create.
The book doesn't get much love and the audio version gets comments about how he can put you to sleep, since he reads himself. Knowing that may have made me more patient with it. What I got out of it was several terrific essays on mostly 19th century and early 20th century American writers. His essays on Genesis, Moby Dick, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos stood out.
The book doesn't get much love and the audio version gets comments about how he can put you to sleep, since he reads himself. Knowing that may have made me more patient with it. What I got out of it was several terrific essays on mostly 19th century and early 20th century American writers. His essays on Genesis, Moby Dick, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos stood out.
October 31, 2009
I really enjoyed this collection of essays about books and authors (and a few other topics). It helped that Doctorow's subject matter fit my interests pretty exactly -- he wrote about a few books (like Moby Dick) that are among my favorites, some others that I've been meaning to read or which I've now moved up on the to-read list (Arrowsmith, for example, and the Rhodes books about the making of the A-bomb and H-bomb), and some others which are not really favorites of mine but which I find interesting and have been reading plenty of anyway (Arthur Miller, although seeing, not reading). Mostly I found the essays thought-provoking though often a little shorter than I wished -- they were enough to get you to wish there was more. So that's not a bad thing at all, really.
October 14, 2007
I liked Doctorow's analysis and interpretations of various authors and figures. Even the books/authors I have not read, I still found his comments interesting and worthwhile. The reasons for only 3 stars: 1) I wish he would have provided more objective historical evidence to back up some of his claims, and, 2) His tone got a bit too intellectual and dry for me way too often. Having said that, his essay on Einstein and nuclear weapons was awesome and worth checking out the book for even if you don't read anything else in it.
January 1, 2017
This collections of essays on some 15 authors are presented as a literary man's musings on the nature of imaginative thought. While Doctorow's writing is clear and lucid, I found them a little too academic in approach for my taste; nor did I find the expression of his thoughts completely convincing. Most of these pieces were written to serve as introductions to the work of each author, and perhaps would best serve as such rather than taken out of context and placed together as here. Others might beg to differ.
June 18, 2012
Wonderfully written analysis of creators, including famous authors, scientists, and, oddly, Harpo Marx. The final essay describes closing the circle, showing how humans have created the ability to become great destructionists with hydrogen bombs. I enjoyed the mix of discussions on authors the most, including Melville and Mark Twain. The audio, read by the author, is slow paced to match the thoughtfulness of the topics.
April 10, 2008
Doctorow looks at creators in many categories (from Twain & Fitzgerald to Einstein & Oppenheimer, e.g.), describing ways they gave "meaning to the unmeant," and why their interpretations of physics and metaphysics shaped the public imagination. His final chapter on the bomb was the most meaningful to me.
August 13, 2016
Although this was a perfect book for me to listen to, with relatively short essays read by Doctorow himself, I really wanted to dwell on some passages, so I may need to obtain a hard copy. Doctorow doesn't so much discuss the writing of Melville, Stowe, Sebald, etc., as describe the authors' worldviews. Especially enjoyed the concluding pieces on Einstein and the Bomb.
Read
October 1, 2012I wanted to be more impressed than I was with this collection of essays. Doctorow's reflections on Genesis, Moby Dick , Amerika , Tom Sawyer , and parallels between Malraux and Hemingway works pay homage to world writers, but cannot be called literary criticism. They are, as he explains, explorations.
October 2, 2007
happily, it's not about fundamentalists - it's a collection of essays analyzing specific authors & works of literature. i just wasn't in the mood for a formal scholarly tone, nor for literary analysis i guess, so i didn't finish the book.
December 15, 2007
Some of the essays are very good and have new and interesting insights. Others, not so much. Some folks might be interested to read Doctorow slamming D. H. Lawrence for not getting Poe and Moby Dick right, but I'm not that into lit crit. It did make me want to read Moby Dick, though.
March 21, 2008
i really love this man and not just because he attended my alma mater. i found his comments on literature, writers, and what artists give of themselves to be thought provoking and quite meaningful. no i didn't love every essay, but overall i thought outstanding.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews