E. L. Doctorow
American novelist (Welcome to Hard Times, 1960; Big as Life, 1966; The Book of Daniel, 1971; Ragtime, 1975; Billy Bathgate, 1989) and longtime editor at Dial Press (1959–1968) and later at New American Library and Random House. As a Dial Press editor in the mid-1960s, Doctorow was one of Mailer's editors for An American Dream (15 March 1965, 65.7) — Mailer's first Dial Press novel — per the published Lennon Days (p. 355). The Doctorow-Mailer editorial relationship spans 1963 (the AAD-to-Dial signing) through 1968 (Doctorow's departure to NAL).
E. L. Doctorow joined Dial Press as an editor in 1959 and was, by the mid-1960s, an established editorial presence at the house. The published Lennon Days (p. 355, 1965 entry) records that An American Dream “is published on 15 March by Dial Press, where E. L. Doctorow is one of his editors.” The Mailer–Doctorow editorial relationship is therefore one of the connective tissues of the AAD project — beginning in fall 1963 with the Scott Meredith–Dial signing, running through the eight-installment Esquire serial of 1964 (64.2–64.9), continuing through Mailer’s revisions of the Esquire text for book publication (Provincetown, summer 1964; second revision on Dial Press galleys, 20 December 1964), and culminating in the Dial Press first edition.
Doctorow would publish his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, in 1960 (Simon & Schuster); his second novel, Big as Life, in 1966 (Simon & Schuster); and would leave Dial Press for New American Library in 1968. His later novels — The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), The March (2005) — establish him as one of the major American novelists of the late twentieth century.
Stub; to be expanded as the Mailer–Doctorow editorial relationship and the parallel novelist relationship are documented.
Related pages
- 1964 | An American Dream | Dial Press | Scott Meredith
- An American Dream: A New Novel Serialized Exclusively in Esquire by Norman Mailer; Installment One: The Harbors of the Moon (64.2) | Installment VIII: At the Lion and the Serpent (64.9)