Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008 Book

Introduction E. L. Doctorow xi

Reading for My Life 1

1958 The Cambridge Scene 9

1958 The Demise of Greenwich Village 12

1959 Pasternak's Hero: Man Against the Monoliths 17

1959 Epitaph for the Beat Generation 1

1962 Richard Nixon's Six Crises 24

1969 Doris Lessing's the Four-Gated City 31

1969 Nabokov's Ada 34

1970 Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude 37

1970 Arthur Koestler's Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing 39

1970 Supergirl Meets the Sociologist 42

1976 Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior 45

1978 Edward Said's Orientalism 47

1988 Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife 50

1981 Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise 57

1987 Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Jim Sleeper's In Search of New York 60

1988 Don DeLillo's Libra 71

1988 AIDS Is Everywhere 77

1988 On the Beat at Ms 81

1988 Nan Robertson's Getting Better 84

1989 Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses 88

1990 Thomas Pynchon's Vineland 93

1990 Günter Grass: Bad Boys and Fairy Tales 103

1990 Peggy Noonan's What I Saw at the Revolution 118

1990 No Turning Back, Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, with Jane O'Reilly 120

1991 Philip Roth's Patrimony 122

1991 Milan Kundera's Immortality 124

1991 Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost 134

1992 Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins 147

1993 Dear Bill (on the Occasion of His Inauguration) 168

1994 Meeting David Grossman 171

1995 Eduardo Galeano Walks Some Words 180

1996 Amos Oz in the Desert 183

1997 Family Values, Like the House of Atreus 194

1997 When Studs Listens, Everyone Else Talks 224

1998 Amazing Grace 227

1998 Morrison's Paradise Lost 230

1999 Ralph Ellison, Sort Of (Plus Hemingway and Salinger) 238

2000 Why Socialism Never Happened Here 249

2001 Maureen Howard's Big as Life 256

2001 Bill Ayers's Fugitive Days 262

2001 Blowing His Nose in the Wind 271

2002 Networks of Terror 281

2003 Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing 286

2004 Jacobo Timerman, Renaissance Troublemaker 289

2005 Jonathan Lethem's Men and Cartoons, The Disappointment Artist, and The Fortress of Solitude 293

2006 Citizen Doctorow 305

2007 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (on Václav Havel) 309

2007 The Last Innocent White Man 316

2007 Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union 320

2005 Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking 332

Writing for His Life 347