Drama, Mapped Categories - Literature

Drinks Before Dinner

Name: Drinks Before Dinner
Author: E. L. Doctorow
ISBN: 9780307799616

by E. L. Doctorow

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Overview

The long-unavailable work by one of America's most eminent writers.

Synopsis

The long-unavailable work by one of America's most eminent writers. Drinks Before Dinner, called “witty and provocative” by the New York Times, is E.L. Doctorow’s only play. A tour-de-force of language and ideas concerning the individual’s role in and response to contemporary America, Drinks Before Dinner revolves around a dinner party for the economically privileged. As Doctorow writes in his introduction, “[This play] deals in general statements about the most common circumstances of our lives, the numbers of us, the cars we drive, the television we watch, the cities we live in, our contraception and our armaments, and our underlying sense of the apocalypse. . . .”

About the Author, E. L. Doctorow

E. L. Doctorow

Few writers have succeeded as E. L. Doctorow has at creating stories (largely based in 1930s New York) that evoke both warm, personal memory and a grander national portrait. Doctorow doesn't always promise historical veracity, but he captures our imagination of the past flawlessly.

Biography

E. L. Doctorow, one of America's preeminent authors, has received the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation For Fiction, and the William Dean Howells medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published a volume of selected essays Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution, and a play, Drinks Before Dinner, which was produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival. He resides in New Rochelle, New York.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).

Good To Know

Doctorow began his career as a reader for Columbia Pictures. He went on to work as an editor for New American Library in the early 1960s, and then served as chief editor at Dial Press from 1964 to 1969.

Critics assailed Doctorow for delivering a commencement address critical of President George W. Bush at Hofstra University in May 2004.