E.L. Doctorow, requiescat in pace ...

[Mark Thibodeau]

I once read a a Paris Review interview with E.L. Doctorow wherein he
explained the genesis for his novel, Loon Lake:

"I had these opening images of a private railroad train on a single track
at night going up through the Adirondacks with a bunch of gangsters on
board, and a beautiful girl standing, naked, holding a white dress up in
front of a mirror to see if she should put it on. I didn’t know where these
gangsters came from. I knew where they were going—to this rich man’s camp.
Many years ago the very wealthy discovered the wilderness in the American
eastern mountains. They built these extraordinary camps—C. W. Post,
Harriman, Morgan—they made the wilderness their personal luxury. So I
imagined a camp like this, with these gangsters, these low-down people
going up there on a private railroad train. That’s what got me started."

This always struck me as impossibly beautiful and a fine summation of the
allure of writing fiction.

R.I.P. E.L. Doctorow.


On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 11:21 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/books/el-doctorow-author-of-historical-fiction-dies-at-84.html
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._L._Doctorow
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150721/ffd12873/attachment.html>