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A Study Guide for E. L. Doctorow's "World's Fair"
A Study Guide for E. L. Doctorow's "World's Fair"
A Study Guide for E. L. Doctorow's "World's Fair"
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A Study Guide for E. L. Doctorow's "World's Fair"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for E. L. Doctorow's "World's Fair", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 22, 2018
ISBN9781535845663
A Study Guide for E. L. Doctorow's "World's Fair"

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    A Study Guide for E. L. Doctorow's "World's Fair" - Gale

    17

    World's Fair

    E. L. Doctorow

    1985

    Introduction

    World's Fair is a novel by American writer E. L. Doctorow, published in 1985. Though Doctorow himself declared it a work of fiction, many have called it a lightly fictionalized memoir, since it borrows many details from Doctorow's own life. The book concerns the childhood, from four to nine years of age, of a boy named Edgar Altschuler in New York City in the 1930s. The adult Edgar chronicles his youthful experiences in precise detail: the sights and sounds of Depressionera New York and his Bronx neighborhood, his gradual awakening to ethnic and class realities, the complex relations among his family members, and much more. These descriptions are interspersed with his struggles to understand the deeper nature of the world around him and his place in it. At times his struggles are rewarded with near-mystical epiphanies. World's Fair won the National Book Award in 1986.

    Author Biography

    Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born on January 6, 1931, in the Bronx in New York City to David and Rose Doctorow. His grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants, and his father owned a music store. By the age of nine he had already decided to become a writer. Doctorow read voraciously, everything from boys' adventure stories to sports novels to Dostoevsky…. I liked tales of horror [as well as] Moby-Dick, Mutiny on the Bounty, anything with the sea in it. This was all before I entered my teens. A high school literary magazine published his first short story, The Beetle, based on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. For a journalism class assignment requiring an interview, he invented a fictitious doorman at Carnegie Hall, and the school paper nearly published it before discovering the falsehood. This prefigured his novels' characteristic blending of fact and fiction: As a boy, I found historical characters in fiction all the time. In Dumas's swashbucklers there was Cardinal Richelieu, in War and Peace there was Napoleon.

    Doctorow majored in philosophy in college, graduating with honors, and then served in the army for several years. In 1955 he returned to New York and found work first as a script reader for television and film studios and later as an editor. During his career as an editor, in 1960, he published his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, a reinterpretation of the western that won him literary acclaim. He followed this in 1966 with a science fiction fable called Big as Life, a critical and commercial flop.

    Three years later, he left the publishing world to pursue a full-time career as a writer, and in 1971 his novel The Book of Daniel was published to widespread praise. Doctorow used the novel to explore the real-life trial and execution of the Rosenbergs, who

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