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    A Study Guide for E.L. Doctorow's "The Writer in the Family"
    A Study Guide for E.L. Doctorow's "The Writer in the Family"
    A Study Guide for E.L. Doctorow's "The Writer in the Family"
    Ebook37 pages26 minutes

    A Study Guide for E.L. Doctorow's "The Writer in the Family"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for E.L. Doctorow's "The Writer in the Family," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories 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 Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535840712
    A Study Guide for E.L. Doctorow's "The Writer in the Family"

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      A Study Guide for E.L. Doctorow's "The Writer in the Family" - Gale

      09

      The Writer in the Family

      E. L. Doctorow

      1984

      Introduction

      In The Writer in the Family, E. L. Doctorow condenses a narrative that resonates with the amplitude of a full-scale novel of family conflict and individual growth into a short story of less than fifteen pages. With a concision whose effectiveness comes from the author's inside-out knowledge of the personalities and family dynamics he is dramatizing, Doctorow not only tells a story of longstanding family animosity and its resolution but also presents the coming-of-age story of a young writer who learns the meaning of art by learning the meaning of self-assertion and artistic integrity. As the opening tale in a collection of six stories and a novella bound in a volume called, after the novella, Lives of the Poets, The Writer in the Family is ostensibly the first of six stories written by the narrator and subject of the novella, Jonathan; in the novella, he is a man of fifty, a New York Jewish writer, while in the first story, he is of high-school age. Thus, The Writer in the Family is presented not only as a freestanding short story but also as an example of the work of a fictional writer of fiction whose story Doctorow presents directly in the novella and variously and indirectly in the six short stories that precede it. Lives of the Poets was published by Random House in 1984. A 1997 reprint is available from Plume.

      Author Biography

      Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, the son of well-educated second-generation Russian-Jewish parents—his father was a musicologist, his mother a pianist—was born Edgar Lawrence Doctorow on January 6, 1931, in New York City, in the Bronx. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he concentrated more on the arts. After graduating from Kenyon College in 1952, Doctorow did graduate work at Columbia University. Drafted into the U.S. Army, he was stationed in Germany. In 1954, during his time in the army, Doctorow married Helen Setzer. The couple has three children. After being discharged from the army, Doctorow began his career as an editor reading scripts at Columbia Pictures in 1955. He did not continue a career in the movie industry but became a senior editor at

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