![]() ![]() Obama has said that Doctorow's 1971 reworking of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, “The Book of Daniel," is among his favorite works.Īnd the author became famous with “Ragtime,” the splashy 1975 novel that chronicles the lives of famous and fictional New Yorkers in the early 20th century, figures like Harry Houdini, Siegmund Freud, Henry Ford, J.P. “Eventually, I asked of a story not only what was to happen next, but how is this done? How am I made to live from words on a page? And so I became a writer.”Īs a 20-something reader sick of reading bad film scripts for Westerns, he decided to write his own parody, which turned into the first chapter of a more serious novel set in Dakota Territory during the 19th century boom, the 1960 "Welcome to Hard Times." “I was a child who read everything I could get my hands on,” he told the Guardian. It was his first attempt at the kind of writing that would make him famous, inventing fictional characters to inhabit real places and times.Īs a child, naturally, he fed his interest in writing with books. When his teacher asked to publish the piece in the school paper, Doctorow confessed that he had made up Karl. The piece was replete with detail, down to how the old man drank his tea, sucking it through a cube of sugar in his teeth, the melting crystals sweetening each sip. In interviews, Doctorow said he knew by age nine that writing was his future.įor a journalism assignment in high school, a young Doctorow interviewed a German-Jewish refugee named Karl who worked as a stage doorman at Carnegie Hall. His father named him after his favorite author, Edgar Allen Poe, who Doctorow once called "our greatest bad author." His books taught me much, and he will be missed.- President Obama July 22, 2015Įdgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in 1931 in the Bronx, the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Russia.įrom birth, it seemed, he was destined to become a writer. Doctorow was one of America's greatest novelists. It is simply common sense,” said the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight earlier this month.Į.L. Justice Sonia Sotomayor has not recused herself from court cases involving publisher Penguin Random House, which has paid her millions in book royalties.“A demand for ethical constraints is not an attack on the Court or any single justice. That should change, say some experts, given the allegations against Justice Alito and recent revelations about gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas from billionaire Harlan Crow.This isn’t about attacking the court’s conservative majority, some insist. Singer had any interest in the cases before the court, he insisted.There’s been a code of conduct for federal court judges since 1973, but the Supreme Court isn’t bound by it. Singer’s hedge fund in a lawsuit that ultimately netted it $2.4 billion.Justice Alito has denied that he did anything wrong. In a prebuttal in The Wall Street Journal published prior to ProPublica’s release of the story – an unusual step – he said that the trip was personal hospitality, and thus he didn’t need to report it. ![]() In 2014, justices voted 7-1 in favor of Mr. That may have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most such gifts, according to the ProPublica story.Nor did Justice Alito recuse himself when cases involving businesses of the billionaire, Paul Singer, came before the court. Is it time for the Supreme Court to have a detailed, binding code of ethics?That’s a question sparked by the recent report from ProPublica that in 2008, Justice Samuel Alito took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska on a billionaire’s private jet.Justice Alito did not report the trip on his financial disclosure.
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