E.L. Doctorow, acclaimed author of Ragtime and other novels, is dead at 84

E.L. Doctorow died on Tuesday in New York City from complications of lung cancer. He was 84. Over a 50-year career as a writer, starting with the Western Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Doctorow won both critical praise and popular success. His first big success was The Book of Daniel (1971), but he is best known for Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005), a fictionalized account of Gen. William T. Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas at the end of the Civil War. His many accolades include a National Book Award for fiction, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and a Pulitzer for The March.

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx in 1931, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in New York City, with a father who sold instruments and a mother who played piano. Determined to be a writer from age 9, he was nonetheless displeased to be named after Edgar Allan Poe, a favorite author of his father's.

"Actually, he liked a lot of bad writers, but Poe was our greatest bad writer, so I take some consolation from that," Doctorow said in 2008. "He died many years ago. My mother lived into her 90s, and I remember asking her in her old age — I finally dealt with the question of my name — 'Do you and Dad know you named me after a drug-addicted, alcoholic delusional paranoid with strong necrophiliac tendencies?' and she said, 'Edgar, that's not funny.'"

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Doctorow was known less for the genre he wrote in — broadly described as literary historical fiction — than for his inventiveness with literary genres and conventions, and his constant experimentation with character and time. "Someone pointed out to me a couple of years ago that you could line them up and in effect now with this book, 150 years of American history," Doctorow said in 2006, upon publication of The March. "And this was entirely unplanned."