Download Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006 AudioBook Free
E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. Here now are his rich, revelatory essays on the type of imaginative thought. In Creationists, Doctorow considers imagination in its many forms, from the literary to the comic to the cosmic. As he wrestles with the subjects which have teased and fired his own imagination, Doctorow affirms that “we know by what we create.”
Just what's Melville doing in Moby-Dick? How did The Adventures of Tom Sawyer impel Mark Twain to the radical rewrite that we know as Huckleberry Finn? Can we ever trust what novelists say about their own work? How could Franz Kafka have written a book called Amerika without ever leaving Europe? In posing such questions, Doctorow grapples with literary creation not as a critic or as a scholar–but as you working writer frankly contemplating the task of another. It’s a perspective that affords him both protean grace and profound insight.
Among the essays collected here are Doctorow’s musings on the different Spanish Civil War novels of Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux; a candid assessment of Edgar Allan Poe as our “greatest bad writer”; and a bracing analysis of the story of Genesis, in which God figures as the utmost complex and riveting character.
In examining the creative works of differing times and disciplines, Doctorow also reveals the foundation and nature of his own artistry. Abundant with aphorism and anecdote, steeped in history and psychology, informed by a lifetime of reading and writing, Creationists opens a magnificent window into one of the fantastic creative minds of the time.
