Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Welcome to Hard Times | 1960 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 2 | Big As Life | 1966 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 3 | The Book of Daniel | 1971 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 4 | Ragtime | 1975 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 5 | Drinks Before Dinner | 1979 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 6 | Loon Lake | 1980 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 7 | American Anthem | 1982 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 8 | World’s Fair | 1985 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 9 | The Waterworks | 1994 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 10 | City of God | 2000 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 11 | The March | 2005 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 12 | Homer & Langley | 2009 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 13 | Andrew’s Brain | 2014 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
| 14 | Billy Bathgate | 1989 | E.L. Doctorow | Buy |
E.L. Doctorow’s novels form a panoramic view of American life. His debut, Welcome to Hard Times, published in 1960, is a dark Western that subverts frontier mythology. Ragtime, his most famous work, interweaves three families — one white upper-class, one immigrant Jewish, one African American — with real historical figures in a portrait of America at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Billy Bathgate follows a Bronx teenager who becomes a protege of gangster Dutch Schultz during the 1930s. The March is an epic account of Sherman’s march through the South, told from multiple perspectives — soldiers, freed slaves, and Southern civilians. Later novels like Homer & Langley and Andrew’s Brain continued Doctorow’s exploration of American obsessions, from hoarding to neuroscience to the nature of consciousness itself.