Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Doctorow, E. L. - Richard D. Beards (review date Summer 1985)

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Richard D. Beards (review date Summer 1985)

SOURCE: A review of Lives of the Poets, in World Literature Today, Vol. 59, No. 3, Summer, 1985, pp. 427-8.

[In the following review, Beards provides a brief survey of the stories collected in Lives of the Poets.]

Subtitled "A Novella and Six Stories," E. L. Doctorow's collection of short works Lives of the Poets challenges the reader to create a heuristic writer whose imagination contains this conglomeration of fictions. The stories employ a variety of narrative stances and voices: first person, omniscient; journalist, police reporter, social psychologist.

The first story, "The Writer in the Family" (the title can be read to underscore the specialness of the writer or to suggest, emphasizing the last three words, the weight of the family on the imaginative soul), is comic, pathetic, and intriguingly reflexive at once. The deceased father's dream of a sea life has been...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Wirt Williams (review date 25 September 1960)
   2. Gwendolyn Brooks (review date 10 July 1966)
   3. Stanley Kauffman (review date 5 June 1971)
   4. Joseph Catinella (review date 17 July 1971)
   5. Patrick Parrinder (review date 4 April 1985)
   6. Richard D. Beards (review date Summer 1985)
   7. Marvin J. LaHood (review date Winter 1987)
   8. Michelle M. Tokarczyk (essay date Fall 1987)
   9. John G. Parks (essay date Winter 1991)
   10. Derek Wright (essay date 1993)
   11. Stephen Matterson (essay date Winter 1993)
   12. Stephen Cooper (essay date May 1993)
   13. Ann V. Miller (essay date Summer 1993)
   14. Stephen Fender (review date 27 May 1994)
   15. John Whitworth (review date 28 May 1994)
   16. Jonathan Franzen (review date 19 June 1994)
   17. Simon Schama (review date 19 June 1994)
   18. Mark Shechner (review date 10 July 1994)
   19. Andrew Delbanco (review date 18 July 1994)
   20. William Hutchings (review date Winter 1995)
   21. E. L. Doctorow with Michelle M. Tokarczyk (interview date Winter 1995)
   22. Michael Wutz (review date Spring 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. E. L. Doctorow