SOURCE: A review of Lives of the Poets, in World Literature Today, Vol. 59, No. 3, Summer, 1985, pp. 427-8.

In the following review, Beards provides a brief survey of the stories collected in Lives of the Poets.

Subtitled "A Novella and Six Stories," E. L. Doctorow's collection of short works Lives of the Poets challenges the reader to create a heuristic writer whose imagination contains this conglomeration of fictions. The stories employ a variety of narrative stances and voices: first person, omniscient; journalist, police reporter, social psychologist.

The first story, "The Writer in the Family" (the title can be read to underscore the specialness of the writer or to suggest, emphasizing the last three words, the weight of the family on the imaginative soul), is comic, pathetic, and intriguingly reflexive at once. The deceased father's dream of a sea life has been destroyed by a demanding family, his immigrant-generated stabs...