I had this terrible moment when I threw 150 pages across the room and said 'If I can make this story dull, I don't have any business writing.' So I put a new sheet in the typewriter and began to write almost in mockery of my own ambition. He was “writing in the third person, and it wasn't working. The novel was a bit shaky getting started it was not until Doctorow had his now-mythical epiphany that it started to take shape. Everything snapped together." He has said numerous times that it is not about the Rosenbergs specifically, but the idea of them. And I realized that the Rosenbergs could be the fulcrum. It occurred to me that I could tell the story of this country's life over a 30-year period by dealing with its dissidents. In an interview, he explained how his interest was piqued: "Out of the.campuses came something called the new left, and I began to wonder how it compared with the old left of the 30s. The Book of Daniel was published in 1971 when Doctorow was a Visiting Author at the University of California, Irvine.ĭoctorow conceived of the idea for the novel in the late 1960s - an era of intense conflicts over Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and social change.
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