Until I was about forty-five, I guess a really violent temper.

Novelist and editor                          

Selected Works:

Welcome to Hard Times - 1960
Big As Life - 1966
The Songs of Billy Bathgate  - 1968
The Book of Daniel. Nominated for a National Book Award, it fictionalized the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union - 1971
Ragtime - 1975.  Received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; it was adapted for the 1981 film Ragtime (nominated for eight Academy Awards) and again for the Broadway musical Ragtime in 1998. Nominated for twelve Tony Awards.
Drinks Before Dinner - 1979, play
Loon Lake - 1980, novel. Nominated for National Book Award for Fiction in Paperback.
American Anthem - 1982. A photographic essay
Lives of the Poets:  - 1984. Six Stories and a Novella
World's Fair - 1985
The Waterworks - 1994
 City of God - 2000
Reporting the Universe - 2003
Sweet Land Stories - 2004. A New York Times Notable Book.
The March - 2005. Awarded the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. Also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and nominated for the National Book Award.
Creationists - 2006. Selected Essays 1993-2006
Wakefield - 2008. Short story
All The Time in the World - 2009. Short story
Homer and Langley - 2009

                          

Wife Helen Setzer, three children.                          

The Songs of Billy Bathgate.  - 1968. Short story; chronicling the career of a folk-rock musician, the tale is told in the form of liner notes. Doctorow would later recycle the protagonists' name for his PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel Billy Bathgate. In an interview published in a compendium of critical analysis of his work, Doctorow claimed that he'd been questioned as to whether or not the protagonist of "Songs" was the son of the protagonist from Billy Bathgate, since the dates of birth given for the protagonists's son in Billy Bathgate correlate to the age of the protagonist from Songs. Doctorow states that, while he had not intended it as such, he has no objection to this view of the characters' lineage. This short story is also mentioned in the song "Sad, Sad, Sad (and Far Away from Home)" by Peter Mulvey.

Billy Bathgate - 1989. Won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and received the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the best novel of the previous five-year period.