Jan 3, 2010

Billy Bathgate | Related Titles

Billy Bathgate is Doctorow's seventh novel, and it has much in common with his earlier work. An interplay of history and fiction, for example, is also explored in his novels from The Book of Daniel (1971) to World's Fair (1985). Even his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), mixes facts about the American frontier with elements of myth and imagination. The history of a specific decade has often been the background for Doctorow's more recent fiction. Ragtime, for example, includes a chronicle of events for the decade leading up to World War I....