Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Doctorow, E. L. - William Hutchings (review date Winter 1995)

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William Hutchings (review date Winter 1995)

SOURCE: A review of The Waterworks, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 138-39.

[In the following brief review, Hutchings outlines the elements of The Waterworks and considers its literary predecessors.]

Walking down Broadway in 1871, a young freelance journalist named Martin Pemberton notices a horse-drawn omnibus containing several old men dressed in black. Among them, he recognizes his dead and supposedly buried father—a businessman who was as notoriously corrupt as he was socially eminent; his fortune, based in part on slave-trading and war-profiteering, has been mysteriously unlocatable since his death. While pursuing his investigation into this strange event, Martin Pemberton disappears: perhaps kidnapped, perhaps murdered, but by whom and why?

From this scenario, E. L. Doctorow has constructed The Waterworks, an intriguing if...

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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