The American writer Edgar Lawrence Doctorou, author of the bestseller "Regtime", died

The American writer, author of the Ragtaym and Billy Batheat novels, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, died on Tuesday in Manhattan at the 85th year of his life, the Russian BBC service reports.

According to the son of a writer, the cause of death was the complications of lung cancer.

Edgar Lawrence Doctorou was born on January 6, 1931 in Bronx (New York), in a second-generation family of Americans of Jewish origin from Russia. Parents of the father - Abram and Geese doctors - were from the Minsk province (Belarus).

Before serving in the army (1953-1955), the doctorse managed to graduate from Kenion College in Ohio and the magistracy in philology at the Columbia University.

In 1956-59, Edgar Doctorou worked in the script department of the Columbia Pictures studio, in 1959-1964 he served as senior editor at the New American Library, and then worked for five years as the editor-in-chief of the Dial Press publishing house.

Since 1969, he completely devoted himself to literary and teaching. In particular, the doctoral was a teacher at the college of Sarah Lorens, at the Yale Drama School, in Princeton, California and New York Universities.

In 1960, he married a student of the theater institute Helen Setzer, who gave birth to three children.

In 1984, the writer became a member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Literature.

Doctoral entered the literature, relying on the traditions of the socio-critical novel of the USA of the 30-40s, and remained faithful to them in almost all his subsequent works.

Direct roll call with the social problems of the Great Depression of the 30s was already contained in the first novel by Doctor of Drummer - "Welcome to Hard Times". An even greater degree of ideological and political topicality was marked by the novel “The Book of Daniel”, written in the form of an autobiography of a young man whose parents died on an electric chair, being accused of treason. The transparent allations of the plot clearly hinted at the “case” of Ethel and Julius Rosenbergs, accused of assisting the issuance of secrets of nuclear technology and executed in the summer of 1953.

The DOCTOROU talent received wide recognition with the publication of the RGTAM novel, which met the needs of American society in understanding the origins of its modern history. The period of the beginning of the 20th century, when the musical style of the regime was widespread, appeared in the doctorse in a stereoscopic image, which included both the fate of fictional characters and the elements of biographies of really existing historical persons. Among the latter, active participants in the novel action are the writer Theodore Dreiser, anarchist Emma Goldman, illusionist Harry Gudini, banker John Pirpont Morgan. The link between the two narrative angles becomes in the novel the image of a Negro musician, virtuoso of the reghauz of Walker. Having captured Morgan’s memorial library along with his adherents, he demanded from the city authorities of New York not so much compensation for material damage caused to him in the past as recognition for the Negro population of the USA firmly for human dignity.

The following novel by Doctor of Drumage, “Loon Lake”, in which the writer made another attempt to join the spiritual and emotional world of the 30s, or the “Red Decade” will penetrate the idea of ​​the continuity of historical eras.

Autobiographical motifs that do not go beyond the memories of childhood and early youth prevailed in the novel "The World Exhibition", in which the reader proceeds before the reader, then accelerating his run, then slowing down, the stream of memoirs of a boy from a poor Jewish family growing in the 30s in Bronx, one of the most unwilled areas of New York.

The outer storylines of the novel "Billy Batheat" applies to New York of the 30s, an epicenter of gangster showdowns of that time.

The action of the novel "March" unfolds in 1864-1865 amid the Civil War in the United States.

In recent years, doctorse often acted as a literary critic and publicist with articles of a programmatic, literary, political and cultural nature.

In 1969, the novel "The Book of Daniel" began to write, which also means "Book of the Prophet Daniel"). In 1983, the novel was filmed by Sidney Lyumet (Daniel film.

Three of his novels are filmed, and the most famous book - "Ragtime" - became a bestseller.