And when I go back to Doctorow’s novels and essays, I find them filled with rhetorical ammunition. When I wonder how he might have characterized the present head of state, I am also childishly wishing that I could watch them fight, or at least hear them debate. This was, perhaps, a mercy for the author himself, but a shame for avid readers like me.

He did not survive to witness Trump’s ascendancy, nor to write about it. Thaw, the architect he murdered, Stanford White, and the chorus girl they both loved, Evelyn Nesbit.īy the time of that fateful press conference, however, Doctorow was 84 years old and very ill with lung cancer. Doctorow was my favorite living writer, and when Trump began his campaign by riding down the escalator to the gold-plated lobby of his tower, I thought the scene could almost have been composed by that great mythologist.īefore Trump was a candidate, before he was even a Republican, he already seemed some kind of throwback to the Gilded Age-a high-society vulgarian straight out of Doctorow’s best-known novel Ragtime (1975), which made fictional characters of real, historical New Yorkers from 100 years ago, including the insane millionaire Harry K. These events were not related, but they have since become fused in my mind. Trump announced and commenced his run for President of the United States. Doctorow died on July 21, 2015, about a month after Donald J.

El doctorow novel