- Hardcover: 192 pages
- Publisher: Random House (Sep 19 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1400064953
- ISBN-13: 978-1400064953
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.3 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,807,321 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
In 16 essays adapted from reviews, book introductions and public lectures, Doctorow explores the theme of literary and scientific creation, considering how creators shape, and are shaped by, the culture that surrounds them. Most of the essays focus on American writers: Doctorow incisively considers the "American consciousness" of Edgar Allan Poe, laments the paradoxical racism of Uncle Tom's Cabin, revels in the Shakespearean riffs of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and pinpoints the "conflicting visions of the same past" in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Doctorow usefully contrasts Ernest Hemingway's distinctly American treatment of the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls with that of his French contemporary André Malraux, and he commends Arthur Miller's moral seriousness. Ranging outside of literature, Doctorow praises the comic genius of his childhood idol, Harpo Marx, tracing his anarchic clowning to a childhood of poverty spent outwitting the urban forces arrayed against him. He examines soberly the national and institutional climate in which the atom bomb's creators were immersed: the bomb's "components were either uranium isotopes or plutonium... and a dread of the malignant war-machined sociopathy of Adolf Hitler." Brilliantly written, Doctorow's cultural and literary analysis abounds in acute literary characterizations and mordant observations. (Sept. 19)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Doctorow follows his resounding novel, The March (2005), Booklist's Top of the List, with his third illuminating essay collection. The "creationists" are those who create, including the Marx Brothers and Einstein, although Doctorow's primary focus is on writers who understand that "the story is a system of knowledge." A profoundly literary and moral thinker, and a master of arresting metaphors and images, Doctorow is as dynamic and discerning a reader as he is a writer, whether he's offering a fluent exegesis of Genesis or fresh and galvanizing inquiries into the foundational works of American literature, indeed, of the American conscience. His candid take on Edgar Allen Poe is exhilarating; his meticulous analyses of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Finn are far reaching; his parsing of Moby-Dick is brilliant in conception and beautiful in execution. "Wars demand novels" is the opening salvo in a bracing discussion that raises provocative questions about how the story of the Iraq War will be told. Whatever the subject, Doctorow's abiding humanism rekindles and sharpens our perception of creativity. How dark and menacing the world would be without the fires of the imagination, the beacons of literature. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
All creationists are mortal., Jan 3 2007
By Aco - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006 (Hardcover)
I picked this up at the library, having known of Doctorow's work for years, but never reading it.These are gathered essays, all regarding the artistic process, E.L.'s own imagination and a critical analysis of particular works.
All of the works and workers are classics. The Bible, Poe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a terrific imagining of Melville's experience writing Moby Dick, Tom Sawyer + Huck Finn as unfulfilled projects, Arrowsmith, F. Scott, an excellent piece comparing Malraux's L'Espoir and Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls, John Dos Passos' U.S.A., why Harpo Marx stands out among his brothers, the German poet/playwright von Kleist (who I now will look out for), a nice short bit on Arthur Miller, how Kafka's first novel Amerika could be written by a guy who'd never been there, W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants (another writer and book I learned about), a great piece on Einstein's imaginative ability, and a closing essay on The Bomb, the furtive genius that created it and the brilliance it destroyed.
The Bible, poets, gigantic classics, silent comedians, scientists and mass destruction...All are created. Creationists are all mortal, but their creations are immortal.
Doctorow's impressive expertise and reverence for each of his subjects makes for terrific reading, and an education.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A loving look at the creative impulse, Jan 13 2007
By Erica Bell - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006 (Hardcover)
"A writer who is not writing is a madman". That's Kafka--one of his letters, I think. Is it the one where he cancelled plans for a country holiday with friends because when a writer is creating, "he must hold on to his desk with his teeth"?E.L. Doctorow understands. He writes in the introduction to his essays,"A novel or play has its origins in the peculiar excitement of the writer's mind. These are powerfully-felt, even inspired, responses to what may be the faintest or fleeting of stimuli--an image, the sound of a voice, a kind of light, a word or phrase, a bar of music."
Doctorow knows how fleeting inspiration is, and he seeks it from the inspired because he also knows just how damn hard it is to get it right. That's why these essays are so nourishing. He includes Harpo Marx and Einstein in this collection. With Harpo taking words and communicating silence, and Einstein thinking frantically against the limits of age, you'll see why.
His essay on Kafka's Amerika [The Man Who Disappeared] is worth the price of the book. Kleist he approaches more obliquely: where is the glorious dramatist who knew women's hearts so well (Penthesilea, The Broken Pitcher)? Later, he muses over Huck Finn, positing that he was Twain's match, a character wholly beyond Twain's ability, a giant metaphor deserving more than the plot Twain gave him. T.S. Eliot said much the same of Hamlet.
Where Doctorow loves (Kafka, Melville, Marx), he writes movingly, even nakedly. Where his mind is tickled, he is a fierce intellect, more than able to communicate the convergence of time, inspiration, culture, failure--and genius.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
First-rate!!, April 25 2007
By Librum "6nomad9" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Creationists: Selected Essays: 1993-2006 (Hardcover)
I can only echo the other positive reviews on this page. The essays in CSE are superb: acutely insightful and beautifully written. Like another reviewer, before I encountered CSE I, too, had known of Doctorow but never read him. I am very pleased to have begun exploring this author's oeuvre with his own reflections on literature and the literary craft. Though I also have yet to read several of the works that Doctorow discusses in CSE, I nonetheless very much enjoyed learning about them and have added them all to my burgeoning list of future reads. Anyone who loves literature will take great pleasure in reading CSE.
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