ABSTRACT
After the publication of Loon Lake, E. L. Doctorow once again turned away from the solitary pursuit of fiction to enter into collaborative ventures. Doctorow’s responses to the dramatic photographs selected by Suares are often sober and occasionally suggest the apocalyptic. Doctorow was also teaching creative writing, giving public readings and lending his support to various liberal political causes. Commuting between New Rochelle and New York and moving between the necessary isolation of the writer and the equally necessary sociability of the film collaborator and literary celebrity, Doctorow started to think about the situation of the writer oscillating between his public and private roles. Lives of the Poets is both formal construction and jeremiad. In describing the isolation of the writer, Doctorow is echoing the artistic anxieties expressed by many of his contemporaries: that the subversive role of the writer has itself been subverted.
