“[Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s] body of work spans fifty years, has been published in more than 30 languages, and consists of novels, short stories, essays, and a play. Doctorow’s debut novel, a Western, Welcome to Hard Times (Simon & Schuster, 1960) was adapted for a film of the same name in 1967. He won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1986 for World’s Fair, and was a Fiction Finalist four other times: in 1972 for The Book of Daniel, in 1982 for Loon Lake, in 1989 for Billy Bathgate, and in 2005 for The March.

Doctorow’s novel Ragtime (1975) received the first National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1976, was named one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the editorial board of the Modern Library, and was adapted for a motion picture in 1981 and a Broadway musical in 1998. His [latest] novel, Andrew’s Brain, [was] published in early 2014.”

Read a full bio from the National Book Foundation.