While researching the novelist E.L. Doctorow in preparation for our upcoming production of the musical adaptation of his novel Ragtime, I ran across this delicious story about the first thing Doctorow ever wrote:

[Doctorow] attended the Bronx High School of Science. While there, an English teacher gave him an assignment to write about a colorful person. The young Doctorow turned in such a vivid description of a doorman at Carnegie Hall whom the famed classical musicians playing there admired, his teacher wanted to photograph the man and run the story and photo in the high school newspaper. Doctorow had to admit he had invented the man. His teacher gave him an F. “The outlines of Doctorow’s future as a novelist were scrawled like body chalk around this failure as a reporter,” wrote Segal in the Washington Post. “The impish disregard for the wall between fact and fiction, the cross-thatching of real celebrities and invented characters, a slight sentimental streak.”

You can read the rest of his literary biography here.

Such an apt story for a writer who mixed real life characters like industrialist J.P. Morgan, magician Harry Houdini and vaudeville performer Evelyn Nesbit with equally memorable but entirely fictitious characters like Coalhouse Walker, don’t you think?

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