Edgar Laurence Doctorow was born in New York on 6 January 1931. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and later studied at Kenyon College, where he received his B.A. in 1952. Like the hero of The Book of Daniel, Doctorow did graduate work at Columbia University (1952-1953). He married Helen Setzer on 20 August 1954 and they have three children, Jenny, Caroline, and Richard. As an editor for New American Library (1959-1964) and Dial Press (1964-1969) and as a teacher at the University of California-Irvine and Sarah Lawrence, he has learned much about the development and present state of such literary subgenres as the Western, the science fiction novel, and the historical novel. His fiction is characterized by its analysis of society through the modification of these familiar literary categories. The result of these interests and experiences has been four novels which stretch the limits of the categories into which...