Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992

The moral and political concerns that drive Doctorow's novels inform these 14 wholly engaging essays and reviews reprinted from the Nation , the New York Times Book Review , Harpers , etc. He presents masterful biographical-critical sketches of Jack London, ``our first writer-hero,'' who championed mutually exclusive ideas of democratic socialism and pseudoscientific racism; and Ernest Hemingway, whose unfinished novel The Garden of Eden arguably contains his most impressive heroine. Doctorow also illuminates Theodore Dreiser's moral vision, Thoreau's Walden , George Orwell's 1984 and poet James Wright, his undergraduate classmate at Kenyon from 1948 to 1952. His eloquent piece, ``A Citizen Reads the Constitution,'' taps that document's revolutionary democratic spirit. Elsewhere Doctorow faults the ``disastrous'' policies of Bush and Reagan, analyzes the emotive appeal of popular songs, excoriates apolitical novelists and plunges us into raw, cosmopolitan, riot-prone 19th-century New York City. (Oct.)