Remembering E.L. Doctorow, 'Ragtime' Literary Lion

by Masha Leon for The Jewish Daily Forward

E.L. Doctorow, who died on July 21 at age 84, was among the literary lions I chatted with at the 1975 American Booksellers Association Convention at the New York Hilton — at which my husband Joe and I were publisher-exhibitors. It was the year Random House published his mega-hit novel “Ragtime.”

Decades later, at the April 2006 Guild Hall Academy of the Arts’ Gala at the Rainbow Room, attended by among others Bud Schulberg and Kurt Vonnegut, Doctorow (a past Guild honoree) and I reminisced about that 1975 “Ragtime” hooplah. We chatted about our mutual friend Marc Jaffe who in 1979 negotiated the $1.4 million advance for the paperback rights to “Ragtime.” I remembered Jaffe — then an editor at New American Library — telling me “It was the largest advance to date…I was the Jew who held the ’Jewish seat’ in (NAL’s) editorial department — a position Doctorow held before me.”

Continue reading.

For more on Jewish books, check out our    page.