By Judith Schwartzstein, Director of Public Affairs, Sarah Lawrence College

Jul. 29, 2015:  Great writers sometimes make great teachers, and E. L. Doctorow, who died on July 21, was a treasured member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College from 1971 to 1983.

Ed Doctorow began teaching fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence in 1971 as a half-time guest faculty member, having published Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Big as Life (1966), and The Book of Daniel (1971). After his first year, he became a full-time member of the faculty. In 1972, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He wrote Ragtime, published in 1975, while teaching at the college.

"Ed was a wonderful teacher and a warm and caring colleague--a lovely man in all sorts of ways. He carried his fame very lightly, modest about his achievements. I was fond of him both as a writer and as a person," noted Ilja Wachs, a longtime member of the literature faculty.

"Ed and I knew each other at the time he was writing Ragtime, and I remember the giddy pleasure he took in the work he did every morning before coming in to teach his class," said Nicolaus Mills, member of the literature faculty. "For some writers, working intensely on a book is isolating. For Ed, writing was liberating. He never felt he had to hoard his insights until he got them down on paper."

Doctorow was deeply admired by his students, three of whom are current members of the Sarah Lawrence faculty.

"He had the remarkable facility of making his students feel our work was as important as his own," said Brian Morton '78, former student, current member of the writing faculty, and author (Florence Gordon, Starting Out in the Evening, and other novels).

"Ed Doctorow gave me the best, most painful advice of my pre-professional career, advice that I occasionally give to students who are as callow now as I was then," said Melvin Bukiet '74, former student, current writing faculty member, and author (After, Strange Fire, and other novels). "When I asked Ed if I was going to be 'a writer,' he thought for a moment and (do I remember a contemplative puff of a pipe?) answered, 'Well, you write very well. But so do a lot of people. Also, you have a voice that's particularly your own. But so do a lot of people.' And then he advocated perseverance. It was the last thing I wanted to hear, but the only sane thing to say." 

Fredric Smoler '75, another former student and current member of the literature faculty, remarked: "Ed Doctorow was witty, never visibly affected by recent and startling fame, and deeply informative about the profession we all hoped to enter. He was a careful and persuasive critic of illustrious contemporaries, some of whom we admired too extravagantly and imitated too slavishly, also an honest judge of our own shortcomings. It was an honor to work with him, and we all knew it; his friendship was a startling compliment, and if offered it we knew that, too. Early in my career I taught The Book of Daniel; decades later, when The March appeared, I immediately added it to a syllabus, and after hearing him read from it in the city, I had the considerable pleasure of telling him that I was teaching it. A bit eerily, he remained as fascinating and impressive as he'd been to a twenty-year-old."

Pictured here:  E. L. Doctorow.

Photo by Gary Gladstone, courtesy Sarah Lawrence College Archives