Here a different ordering of the relationship between needs and their satisfaction prevailed, transforming the need for thrift into the wish to get rich quick at the numbers and the enforced temperance of prohibition into the casual drunkenness of the speakeasies. Firm believers in the spirit of capitalism even in the era of the Depression, gangsters constructed an underworld that released Americans from the economic virtues they produced out of their everyday fears. Gangsters like Dutch Schultz took advantage of the defensive Puritanism the Depression induced in everybody else. In Billy's mind, these words of recognition were not casual but magically removed him from the East Bronx, where he was the helpless plaything of forces that seemed to juggle with his fate and placed him in hands that had learned to control these forces. Dutch Schultz catches Billy's juggling act, calls him a "capable boy," then returns to his world. On this day, Billy's juggling act brings him the attention of Dutch Schultz, the notorious gangster from the news stories, who like Billy began in the East Bronx. Billy's story begins on a day in 1935 when these unrelated activities come into magical relationship with one another. Billy learns control over the powerful forces threatening his life in two unrelated activities: reading about gangland heroes and juggling on Bathgate Avenue. He lives in the East Bronx with his mother his father had abandoned them years earlier leaving Billy to make it on his own and Billy's mother in a state of permanent mental distraction. In Billy Bathgate, Doctorow returns to the Bronx of the 1930's to restore another dimension to that life.īilly Bathgate is a child of the Depression. In World's Fair, Doctorow brings everyday life in the Bronx of the 1930's back into recollection with a historian's clear eye for detail and texture. While the subject matter of these novels covers a time period of over 100 years-ranging from the Wild West in Welcome to Hard Times to the 1960's youth culture of The Book of Daniel-the setting to which Doctorow obsessively returns is that of New York City at around the time of his birth (1931).
Doctorow has written eight novels for which he has received a number of prestigious awards.
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