...The author of a dozen novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage drama, as well as essays and commentary on literature and politics, Mr. Doctorow was widely lauded for the originality, versatility and audacity of his imagination.Doctorow was a major backer of The Nation magazine, "the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States ... self-described as 'the flagship of the left'" [Wikipedia]Subtly subversive in his fiction — less so in his left-wing political writing — he consistently upended expectations with a cocktail of fiction and fact, remixed in book after book; with clever and substantive manipulations of popular genres like the Western and the detective story; and with his myriad storytelling strategies. Deploying, in different books, the unreliable narrator, the stream-of-consciousness narrator, the omniscient narrator and multiple narrators, Mr. Doctorow was one of contemporary fiction’s most restless experimenters. -- NY Times Obit
Here is a recent excerpt from Doctorow's March 2015 Nation essay Home
...the Koch brothers’ failure is only incidental to their wealth. Theirs is the sin of what can hardly be imagined as a factor of power: it is maladaptive failure, the failure to understand the realities and do something about them. The Kochs have lost that; they are staggering about in the woods with no idea what to do beyond preserving their fiefdom. We need not go into the reasons for this failure—psychological, emotional, structural—the cost to us is too great.Theo Bikel, and now Doctorow - oy veh!At this stage of the climatic problem, it is not the priests, rabbis or ministers among us who are saying that “pride goeth before the Fall”; it is the scientists. That interests me—this turn to religious moralizing on the part of the secular community. It may represent an enormous cultural shift, a kind of re-establishment of a new liturgical authority. Because it is an undeniable worship of the earth that would ask us to save it. If anyone were to walk the streets with a sign saying The End Is Near, I would expect it to be someone with a PhD in physics. This would explain the public aversion of some to the idea of science: that its practitioners speak, however technically, as prophets—a prophet, of course, being someone to be ignored.
It may be with some resentment that we feel, after all that has been done to the earth in many thousands of years, that it should fall to us, to our generations, to pay the price. Yet it was only the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century that sped us into recognizably modern times. Wordsworth wrote in the early 1800s: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours….”