Reporting the Universe (William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization) by E. L. Doctorow

The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies

by E.L. Doctorow

"The writer," according to Emerson, "believes all that can be thought can be written...In his eyes a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported." And what writer worth his name, E. L. Doctorow asks, will not seriously, however furtively, take on the universe? Human consciousness, personal history, American literature, religion, and politics--these are the far-flung coordinates of the universe that Doctorow reports here, a universe that uniquely and brilliantly reflects our contemporary scene.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

History based known novels of American writer Edgar Laurence Doctorow. His works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN Saul Bellow Award given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American Literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.

Reviews

[Ryan Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two things to ponder regarding the great Doctorow's treatise on writing-as-religiosity:

1. "It is as if piety itself has a flawed circuit that tends to blow, and the devotion to God becomes the will to power" (p. 90).

2. On current political discord: "The instructive image is from Dante's "Inferno," Canto XXV. We are in a pouch of the Eighth Circle, where the thieves reside. A typical transaction occurs between a thief and one of Hell's manifestations, in this case a monstrous six-legged lizard-like creature who leaps onto a thief, wraps its middle feet around its belly, pins his two arms with its forelegs, and, wrapping its rear feet aound his knees, swings its tail up between his legs and sinks its teeth into his face. And so intertwined, the monster and thief, they begin to melt into one another like hot wax, their two heads joining, their substances merging, until a new third creature is created though somehow redolent of both of them. And it slowly slithers away into the darkness" (p. 106).

And yet, this book is about writing. Brilliant.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

The biographical bits about childhood and Kenyon were lovely, but musings on religion and politics just left me cold.

[Chris Craddock]

Great collection of essays about philosophy, politics, and religion. Inspired to take on the essay form, and also to read Doctorow's novel: City of God. Halfway through that novel now and parts of it are a lot like essays. Also poems, stories, and songs, all from multiple points of view. But that is another review, and to return to Reporting the Universe, a collection of essays, it is a great collection.