The works by E.L. Doctorow, John Gardner and Cormac McCarthy.

Edgar Laurence Doctorow (born January 6, 1931, New York, New York) is the author of several critically acclaimed novels that blend history and social criticism. Although he had written books for years, it was not until the publication of The Book of Daniel in 1971 that he obtained acclaim. His next book, Ragtime, was a commercial and critical success. As of 2006, he held the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University.

Doctorow was raised in the Bronx, New York, by parents of second-generation Russian Jewish descent. At the Bronx High School of Science, he excelled in art making. Doctorow was a voracious reader and continued his education at Kenyon College where he studied with John Crowe Ransom. After graduating with honors in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University before he was drafted into the army and assigned to Germany. He began his career as a reader at Columbia Pictures, moved on to become an editor for New American Library in the early 1960s and worked as chief editor at Dial Press from 1964 to 1969.

· Major works:

· (1968) The Songs of Billy Bathgate. Short story; chronicling the career of a folk-rock musician, the tale is told in the form of liner notes. Doctorow would later recycle the protagonists' name for his PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel Billy Bathgate.

· (1971) The Book of Daniel. Nominated for a National Book Award, it fictionalized the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

· (1975) Ragtime. After receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and the Arts and Letters Award, it was transformed into a film in 1980 and a musical in 1998.

· (1985) World's Fair. Received the 1986 National Book Award.

· (1989) Billy Bathgate. A finalist for the Pulitzer and won the PEN/Faulkner award. Made into a major motion picture in 1991, which Doctorow considered "a disappointment".

· (2005) The March. Awarded the National Book Critics' Circle award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. Also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and nominated for the National Book Award.

Ragtime. This historical fiction is mostly set in New York City from about 1900 until the United States entry into World War I in 1917. A unique adaptation of the historical narrative genre, the novel blends three fictional American families and various actual historical figures into a historical framework that revolves around events, characters and ideas important in the History of the United States.

The narrative tells of the interlinking lives of three groups of people.

The first group consists of "Father", "Mother", "Mother's Younger Brother", "Grandfather", and a young boy. They make up a white American upper middle class family that lives in New Rochelle, New York. Father and Brother are involved in producing U.S. flags and fireworks for displays of American patriotism. Father is represented as a character stuck in the past, but keen to make his mark in history. He takes part in the expedition that discovers the North Pole, but only joins the expedition for a fraction of the sledge journey. Brother gets mixed up with Coalhouse Walker's retaliation attempt (described in more detail below) due to his expertise in explosives. Although it is not explicitly stated in the narrative, many readers get the impression that the unidentified narrator of the book is the family's little boy, recalling the events of his childhood in his old age. The reader should be aware, however, that the piece is written in third person omniscient, and thus the narrator may not be the boy.

The second family is composed of the Jewish immigrants Tateh, Mameh, and Little Girl, who struggle to survive. Tateh is a strong advocate of the radical left, involved in the local Artist Socialist Group, and while opposed to Emma Goldman's anarchism, he finds solidarity with it.

The third family is an African-American couple, Coalhouse Walker and Sarah, who is the mother of his newborn boy and is supported by Mother from the New Rochelle family. Coalhouse is a ragtime musician. He owns a Ford Model T. This causes resentment by some racist whites, upset at seeing a Negro owning the middle-class status symbol of an automobile, and makes Coalhouse the target of hostility. Walker's Model T is vandalized by members of the local fire department. Sarah gets killed by the police who mistake her hysterical attempt to petition for justice as a threat. After failing by peaceful means to get compensation, Coalhouse turns to violence, declaring that he will not stop until his Model T is repaired. These acts are a major turn in the novel.

By the end of the novel, the surviving members of the three families have merged into one in an allegorical representation of the "Melting Pot" nature of the nation.

John Champlin Gardner, Jr. (1933 - 1982) was an American novelist and university teacher. He was a popular and controversial figure until his death in a motorcycle accident at the age of 49.

Gardner's father was a lay preacher and dairy farmer; his mother taught English at a local school. His parents were very influential in his life. Both parents were fond of Shakespeare and often recited literature together. As a child, Gardner attended public school and worked on his father's farm, where, in April 1945 when Gardner was 11, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident with a cultipacker. Gardner, who was driving the tractor during the fatal accident, carried the guilty feeling of responsibility for his brother's death throughout his life, suffering nightmares and flashbacks; the incident informed much of Gardner's fiction and criticism—most directly in the 1977 short story "Redemption", which included a fictionalized recounting of the accident.

Gardner began his university education at DePauw University, but received his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1955. He received his M.A. from the University of Iowa.

Gardner's most popular novels are: The Sunlight Dialogues, about a brooding, disenchanted policeman who is asked to engage a madman fluent in classical mythology; Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view; and October Light, about an aging and embittered brother and sister living and feuding together in upstate New York. This last novel won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in 1976. Each book features brutish, isolated figures struggling for integrity and understanding in an unforgiving society.

Gardner married cousin Joan Louise Patterson on June 6, 1953; the marriage saw children but ended in divorce. Gardner married the poet Elizabeth Rosenberg in 1980, but this marriage also ended in divorce. His fatal motorcycle crash came days before he was to marry Susan Thornton. (Her On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner, published in 2000, is a memoir of her relationship with Gardner.)

Gardner is buried next to his brother Gilbert in Batavia's Grandview Cemetery.

Cormac McCarthy (born July 20, 1933) is an American novelist who has authored ten novels in the Southern Gothic, post-apocalyptic fiction, and western genres.

Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and sometimes to Herman Melville.

McCarthy's family moved to Knoxville in 1937. He is the third of six children, with three sisters and two brothers. In Knoxville he attended Catholic High School. His father was a successful lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority from 1934 to 1967.

McCarthy entered the University of Tennessee in 1951-1952 and was a liberal arts major. In 1953 he joined the US Air Force for four years, he spent two years of this time in Alaska where he hosted a radio show. In 1957 he returned to the University of Tennessee. During this time in college he published two stories in a student paper and won the Ingram-Merril award in 1959 and 1960. In 1961 he and fellow university student Lee Holleman were married and had their son Cullen. He left school without earning a degree and moved with his family to Chicago where he wrote his first novel. He returned to Sevier County, Tennessee, and his marriage to Lee Holleman ended.

His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by Random House in 1965. He decided to send the manuscript to Random House because, "it was the only publisher I had heard of." At Random House the manuscript found Albert Erskine, who was William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner's death in 1962. Mr. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy for the next 20 years.

In the summer of 1965 using a Traveling Fellowship award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters he shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania. He hoped to visit Ireland, however he met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a singer. They married in England in 1966 and McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza where he wrote his second novel Outer Dark. After he returned to America with his wife, and Outer Dark was published in 1968 to generally favorable reviews.^[1]

In 1969, McCarthy moved with his wife to Louisville, Tennessee, purchasing a barn, which McCarthy renovated, even doing the stonework himself. Here he wrote his next book Child of God, based on actual events. Child of God was published in 1973 and like Outer Dark before it Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976 McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas. Later, in 1979 his novel Suttree was finally published. He had been writing Suttree on and off for twenty years. Supporting himself with the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship he wrote his next novel Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, which was published in 1985 and considered to be his best work.

McCarthy lives in the Tesuque area of Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Jennifer Winkley and their son John. He guards his privacy closely and rarely gives interviews; one of his few interviews (with the New York Times) described McCarthy as a "gregarious loner". He remains active in the academic community of Santa Fe and spends much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded by his friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann.