Homer and Langley »

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.

From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.

Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers–the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers–wars, political movements, technological advances–and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through...

The Barnes & Noble Review

In the spring of 1947, I was 11 and Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was 15. In those years before television, we lived in a city of legend and myth called New York. I lived in a tenement in Brooklyn. Doctorow was a resident of the distant Bronx. In our separate worlds, we shared the same myths. Most of the tales were oral, full of gangsters and ballplayers and occasional heroes. But our imaginations were also fed by the written word. By books, usually borrowed from the public library, and by newspapers.

Then one morning in March those newspapers gave us a brand-new myth: the tale of the Collyer brothers: Homer and Langley. On March 21st, someone made a call to the police, saying that there was a dead man in the four-story brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 128th Street in Harlem. The cops knew the house for its two ancient inhabitants, its boarded-up windows, its vile summer stench. Neighbors knew the men as ghostly nocturnal figures.