If journalism is the rough draft of history, where does fiction fit into this family of letters? What is the relationship between imagination and fact? How is history tangled, reinvented and metabolized into art? Many of us at newspapers grapple with these questions every day, and they are the same ones that animate the extraordinary work of E.L. Doctorow, winner of this year’s Chicago Tribune Literary Prize.
Following Literary Prize winners who preceded him–Arthur Miller, Tom Wolfe, August Wilson, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates–E.L. Doctorow will accept his award on Nov. 4 at Symphony Center. Later that day, fiction and fact meet on another Tribune stage, when Heartland Prize winners Robert Olmstead, for the novel “Coal Black Horse,” and Orville Vernon Burton, for the non-fiction work “The Age of Lincoln,” converse about their craft. (Staff writer Jessica Reaves interviewed them in this week’s pages.)
Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller spent a chilly, gray day with Doctorow in Sag Harbor, N.Y., relishing a conversation that put his work in context for her cover story, “The sage of Sag Harbor.”
“Doctorow gives us the feel and sweep of our national past,” notes Julia. “The stories are irresistible. The people are real. The moral drama is always front and center.”
Plus, she adds: “He’s a gentleman. There’s not an ounce of pettiness or bombast in him.”
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etaylor@tribune.com
Home on the Range will be back on the range soon.
FOR TICKETS TO THE LITERARY PRIZE CEREMONIES
Sunday, Nov. 4, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave. E. L. Doctorow, 10 a.m. Books will be available for purchase; Robert Olmstead and Orville Vernon Burton, 1 p.m. at the Art Institute of Chicago. Books will be available and Heartland authors will sign books following their program. Tickets for both events are $15 each and available at the Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) Ticket Office, 312-494-9509 or go to www.chfestival.org
