E.L. Doctorow

Past Nominations and Wins

1975

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, published by Random House. Nominated for Best Novel in 1975

E. L. Doctorow (1931-2015) was not particularly known as a genre author, however in 1976, he was nominated for the Nebula Award for his novel Ragtime, which would eventually be turned into a Broadway musical. Doctorow wrote a dozen novels, including Billy Bathgate and The March. He was the recipient of three National Book Critics Circle Awards. He began writing while a student at Bronx Science. After serving in the army, he worked as a reader for a film company and began writing his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times as a parody of the Western scripts he was reading, although the novel eventually became a reclamation of the genre. Doctorow worked as an editor at NAL, where some of his authors included Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand, before moving to Dial Press, where he worked with Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and William Kennedy. He left publishing in 1969 to become a full time author.