Course Description

Instructors: Dan Zins, PhD

Emma Goldman. Henry Ford. Freud and Jung. Admiral Perry. Houdini. J.P. Morgan. Evelyn Nesbit. Booker T. Washington. Zapata. In his best-selling and prophetic 1975 novel, Doctorow boldly--and unapologetically--re-imagines the lives of these and other historical figures who share the stage with his novel’s main (fictional) characters, including Coalhouse Walker, whose quest for justice for racist humiliation and the killing of his fiancée provides a powerful narrative thrust to the novel’s second half. Doctorow challenges, complicates, and problematizes our rarely questioned binaries: fiction-nonfiction, fact-fiction, fiction-history, fiction-truth.