[This entry was updated by Douglas Fowler (Florida State University) from his entry in DLB 173: American Novelists Since World War II, Fifth Series.]

E. L. Doctorow's narrative art is a distinctive fusion of moral involvement and poetic transformation. Like Philip Roth, he is a fabulist with a lesson to teach his readers about the great century of American ascendancy. Like Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller, he is distrustful of and yet spellbound by the misuses of power. Like William Kennedy, another city boy with a fascination for gangsters, crime and the atonement for crime compel his most sensitive attention. Like Vladimir Nabokov, he believes prose for prose's sake is an art worth a lifetime of devotion. And like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ambrose Bierce, and William Faulkner, he infuses a lurid gleam of the macabre in his created kingdoms, revealing a showy, politically incorrect taste for terror...