![]() ![]() Doctorow at his home in Sag Harbor, New York on the very day he completed his new novel. Doctorow has been addressing controversial issues in American life. Whether in his novels - his new one will be published next year - or in essays, articles and speeches, E.L. In Book of Daniel, which also became a movie, Doctorow used the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to explore the radical imagination the conflict of personal vision and public orthodoxy. Ragtime, his bestselling novel which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became a movie by the same name, evokes America at the beginning of the century when progress was divorced from justice. Reality and myth mingle to reveal a history once hidden. In his novel, truth emerges from the shadows. Doctorow has been conducting a long meditation on the meaning of modern American history. The best writers are a nuisance to authority because, he says, they prefer the uncomfortable truth to the comfortable lie. My guest tonight thinks there are worse things than rattling the authorities. Yet not one was ever convicted of a crime. Vincent Millay, Norman Mailer, and many others, it turned out, had come under suspicion of subversion, espionage or immorality. ![]() Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pearl Buck, Edna St. ![]() The news broke just last year for over five decades the FBI had been keeping intelligence files on dozens of American writers. BILL MOYERS: Good evening, I’m Bill Moyers. ![]()
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