From Ragtime to Billy Bathgate to City of God, writer E.L. Doctorow uses historical fiction to tell the story of the American experience. On April 2007 in Washington, there was a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society on the theme of “The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society,” and Doctorow gave a speech, later reprinted as an essay in The Nation.

The essay titled “The White Whale” appeared in the July 14, 2008 edition of The Nation,and speaks of the country’s newest war, and what Doctorow refers to as “incremental fascism” under the Bush Administration. Read an excerpt from the Doctorow’s recent essay:

Apart from this uncanny synchronous spin, the domestic political fantasy life of these past seven years finds us in an unnerving time loop of our own making–in this country, quite on its own, history seems to be running in reverse and knowledge is not seen as a public good but as something suspect, dubious or even ungodly, as it was, for example, in Italy in 1633, when the church put Galileo on trial for his heretical view that the earth is in orbit around the sun.

More on E.L. Doctorow

American Masters: Hear Doctorow read his essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald.
E.L. Doctorow, writer: on the element of horror.
NewsHour: ‘Essay: Body of Work’ — December 3, 2002. Through the books of E.L. Doctorow, essayist Roger Rosenblatt discusses the author’s oeuvre.