(born 1931) Novelist born and residing in New York City, known for mixing historical figures and fiction in novels like The Book of Daniel (1960), based on the Rosenberg case, Ragtime (1975), an adaptation of an eighteenth-century German historical narrative to the lives of New Yorkers at the beginning of the twentieth century (made into a Broadway musical in 1998), Billy Bathgate (1989), about Dutch Schultz’s mob-dominated Bronx in the 1920s, and Loon Lake (1980), portraying American life during the Depression years of the 1930s. Doctorow has also been vocal politically as an editor-in-chief for Dial Press (where he worked with such writers as Norman Mailer and James Baldwin) and as a frequent contributor to left-leaning magazines like The Nation.