Abstract

Of Melville, Poe and Doctorow
Solotaroff, Ted | June 6, 1994 issue

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This article critically appraises the book "The Waterworks," by E.L. Doctorow. One of the several fascinating features of E.L. Doctorow's new novel, which takes place in 1871, is that it settles in the mind like a kind of missing link in literary evolution. Melville's provenance in "The Waterworks" is less a matter of literary traces than of a great shadow cast on Doctorow's moral imagination, urging him to see darkly and negatively all the way to the end of sanity and morality, and to make a distinctively American allegory of it, updated from the era of the New England oversoul and whaling industry.

See Also:

WATERWORKS, The (Book); DOCTOROW, E. L.; BOOKS & reading; CRITICISM; LITERATURE; IMAGINATION
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