>> we are very fortunate and privileged tonight to have as our guest, one of the countries, one of the world finest novelists. and i think most of you know at

least some of e.l. doctorow's dozen books, dozen novels. book of daniel, "ragtime," moon lake. "world's fair," "billy bathgate." of course, the extraordinary book of march which was his most regally published book. we are going to let our guest had a few introductory words on the issues that i think we would like to talk to him about. but let me say to begin with that this is a better day for the american conversations, discussions we've been having. i thank him for joining us.

editor lauren doctorow had the good sense to be born in new york and live in the bronx. what more can i say? [laughter] >> second generation american. his father was a fan of edgar allan poe. i assume that is what that is where the edgar comes from? mac you are speaking of my youth? >> right. >> it was pretty wild. i read all the time. and we had a lot of music in the family. my mother was a pianist. and my father was proprietor of a music shop. he kept it going through the depression, and finally lost it in the 1940s. but there was always a lot of books in the house, a lot of music and no money.

and they were readers, my parents. am i speaking to the point here? >> yes. >> and then i found out i was named after a ground po. there is always an injunction when children are given names and poe, my father loved his work. actually eat like a lot of bad writers. [laughter] >> but poe is our greatest bad writer so i take some solution there. he died many years ago. my mother lived into her 90s. and i remember asking her, in her old age, i finally got with the question of my name. and i said did you and dad realize you made me after a drug addicted alcoholic, delusional,

paranoid tendencies. >> and she said edgar, that's not funny. [laughter] ♪ (singing) but i decided as a writer about the age of nine. and i didn't feel it was necessary to write anything having made a bad decision that the trend for some time. but i was reading everything. i was very fortunate that television really hadn't landed by then. so everything came from books and public library, books, and radio shows for children. and at a certain point i began to ask another question, what's going to happen next. and i found myself asking the question how is this done? and i think that's sort of the question a writer a kid who's going to to be a writer would

ask, beginning to wonder when you see lines on the page and you create so many emotions and put pictures in your mind. i remember being particularly impressed by jack london. i remember picking a book out of a library called mademoiselle by gauthier that made my ears red. very sexy book. and picking up a book that i like the title, and that's the way it went your guy went from one book to another. and my father kept an eye on my reading, and very discreetly i realized later. and he saw me reading a lot of ministries, mysteries and go stories in that kind of things. so we were at my grandmothers house, and my grandfather had a

wonderful library. and picked a book out of my grandfather's library and said here's a book called the green hand. that's really creepy. maybe you should take a look at this one. and while all the grown-ups are having tea, and take on a sunday afternoon, i sat in the corner and i read this book, of course. my father tricked me. it wasn't about a green and. it was about a novice aboard a ship, a green and. and by that route as i began to read a lot of sea stories and that got me into captain hornblower and all that sort of thing. >> there's a story that you told, edgar, about an assignment in a writing class. >> oh, yes. i told the story once or twice before. in washington, but i wanted to write, i was having a very difficult time. they were all very smart

children are. and some of them quite insufferable walking around, predicting in some cases correctly, that they were going to win the nobel prize in physics. [laughter] >> so i fled down the hall to the literary magazines called dynamo. and they were my first published. and they published a story called the via. i was reading at a time. this is a story of self defamation in the spirit of copper to. but then i took a journalism class. i think that's what you meant. just because a chance to write. and it didn't interest me too terribly but then we got an assignment to do an interview. and i really went to town on that. >> you write about a colorful person. >> what? >> i said to write about a colorful person. >> it took a while to interview

someone. and i gave my interview into the teacher. it was an interview with the stage, he was a german jewish refugee named carl. it lost all of his hand-picked he was a dear old man. he had come to work mismatching brown trousers and blue shirt, jacket. and he would bring his lunch in the evening in a paper bag, and a thermos of tea. and he drank his tea in the old world style by putting a cube of sugar between his teeth and he would drink the tea through the sugar. and all the great artists loved him. or woods and toscanini, and they all called him carl, by his first interview is very knowledgeable in music. and so that was my interview with carl, the stage door man. and the teacher called me up the next day and said this is the best interview that i have ever seen coming out of this class. we're going to run it in the

school newspaper, but i want one of the photography kids to go down to carnegie hall and take carl's picture to go along with the story. and i said, i don't think that's a very good idea. and she said why not? and i said, well, karl is very shy. and she said shy? you talk to you, didn't he? and i said not exactly. there is no carl. i made him up. [laughter] >> that was a bad day. [laughter] we didn't have those problems because none of us wrote. >> the teacher, either the teacher nor i understood what it portends that event was. i just thought it was so much easier to make up than to go out and interview someone.

[laughter] >> and then of course, i would give the teacher entirely different answer. i would say i was just doing what journalists always do. [laughter] >> you said about the same subject, at a later period in your life i think that should intrudes on history. historians know that they are not objective. where mythology and history converge. that's where i started where mythology here call was mythology. >> well, i take the position that if there was no carl, there should have been. and so i filled in and need there. >> that's important. people talk his way in the bronx. [laughter] >> and they also, as you did and i probably did. i know i did, to the public library's. remember public libraries? that's when you came back with a huge number of books and had

them led by the following day and to come back and just kept going. >> public library is very important to me. and not only the books, but the physical books. some of those books have been read for such a long time that these library books, thick bindings and the pages were like cloth they have been read so many times. like a page of cloth in your hand. that was the response. and another good thing. there was a bakery, and industrial bakery a block away from the washington avenue branch of the library i went to. and i used to walk through this mediator of bakery smell to get to the library. so i match, conflate bread with books. in my mind. there was always a connection there. >> if you had parents who owned a delicatessen, restaurant, as mine did, you can play did not

read, as bagels. >> they bake everything. those breads came out. they had those little union labels on them. those little stickers they used to put on bread. i don't know why i remember things like that, but there was one point at which my loyalty to writing faded a little. and i decided i wanted to become an aeronautical engineer. and my older brother looked at me and he said, he just liked the sounds of the words, that's all. i didn't know what an aeronautical engineer was. [laughter] >> how do you get from the bronx to camden college? two different worlds. >> that was very strange. i had read the poetry, a new

critic, elegant, minor poet. minor poet or a very classy thing to be. and i just had the feeling i wanted to go out and study with him. and to my astonishment, i was accepted at camden college. and i remember, you know the way kids do they go off to college. they have truckloads of equipment they have skis and they have surfboards and they have computers and they have speakers and they have things i don't even understand. i went down to penn station. i had a little suitcase and a paper bag with a sandwich and an apple. and a container of milk your and i said goodbye at the old penn station. my parents, at the age of 16, got on this train, went overnight. and i finished my centers by the time we got to newark. [laughter]

>> and i get very hungry later on. but it was a wonderful educati education. and i ended up not being an english major but a philosophy major. i was a great philosopher. it was the best two-man philosophy department in the country. phillip price and virgil aldrich. and i did get to study with ranson. took a couple of courses with him. and i also got interested in theater and started to act in the college productions. but i didn't get any really good roles until one of the older veterans who was a senior graduate, his name is paul newman. [laughter] >> i wonder whatever happened to him? but that was kenyan. we wrote literary criticism the way they played football at ohio state.

very serious about their words. it was probably in those days, i later found myself talking up in connecticut to a writer named robert been worn. and he was connected to kenyon in someway. he said when i was there, kenyon was probably the best undergraduate college in the country. i was very pleased to hear that. >> at what point do you begin using history in your fictional work? is there a particular place at which it just arts, or wasn't always so natural for you that you never really drew a distinction between -- >> that's a good question. i think that what happened is this. a series of creative accidents. i was working as a reader after i got out of the army for

columbia pictures in new york city. and what you did, as you read a book you wrote a report about it and made a judgment as to whether a film could be possibly be made. in those days, the people, westerns were very popular and so i found myself reading these awful terrible westerns day after day. i thought i had become seriously ill. and so one day i sat down. i wrote a story that was a parody of all of the stuff i have been reading. and i showed it to my boss, johnny johnston. he said this is good. you want to turn it into a novel. so i crossed out the title of the story and wrote chapter one on the material. and doing nothing about writing a novel, i started. well, it turned out to be a novel about the dakota territory

in 1870s. and i started out thinking of a parody, and then i got more interested in the idea of making something serious out of a disreputable genre. so there's a structural parity in the book, but it doesn't make fun of anything. and the book was published and it got pretty good reviews. and i thought i really had gotten away with something, because of course i had ever been west ohio which is where kenyon was. i thought ohio was the last. -- the west extractor is a great tradition of these things. >> that was filed in the travel sections of the state. >> the reviews are pretty kind. but then i got a letter from a

lady at texas. she was an elderly woman. i could tell by their very fine cursive hand she had of the 19th century penmanship. she said young man, i was with you until chapter five when you had jake nake make his dinner of a prairie dog. she said, at that moment i knew you had never been west of ohio. [laughter] >> because the hodge of a prairie dog wouldn't fill a teaspoon, she said. so i wrote back, well, that may be true of prairie dogs today, madam. [laughter] >> but just to show you what henry james and then, when he said a fiction writer, he sees

into the unseen. when i told this story all while ago i got an e-mail from a man who is familiar with lewis and clark journals. and he said there was an item about a sergeant killing a prairie dog and making dinner for two officers out of that prairie dog. so i was right. [laughter] >> but you asked how i got into history. but i think it went from genre into history. growing up in new york, i never felt the city confirmed a little red identity on me the way the midwest would have on sinclair lewis or the south lawn were involved or. and somehow i stumbled onto the idea that a sense of time was as much is organizing a principle or book as a sense of place.

and the second book i wrote i won't even talk about, it was a bomb. but then somehow that informed the book of daniel and "ragtim "ragtime." and on the other hand, i don't think of myself as a writer of historical novels. i object to that modification of the word novelist. >> would you like to me talk about that? >> guess i would. you note i did not call you a historical novels. i called you a novelist from the bronx. >> well, michael really understand, of course there is a genre of historical novels, caution, we are made to think it was the worst time, you would have lived in that time. i am not talking about the genre, which i think is fairly meretricious. but the scarlet letter and

nathaniel hawthorne was writing about the period 150 years before his own life. do we think of that as a historical novel? no. mark twain wrote tom sawyer 40 years later. he was talking about his childhood in the west, in the south south, in the 1840s he wrote the book in the late 1870s. but you don't think of tom sawyer, huck finn as a historical novel. and also, if you think about, every novel is about the past, even if it is written in the present. it is inevitable, so what you're saying, well, we call the circle novel not only because it takes place in the past but because historical characters in it. on the other hand we don't think of tolstoy's war and peace as a historical novel. you don't think of stone dolls charterhouse as a historical novel. they have characters that are

historically verifiable. in 1985, i published -- i published a book called gross fear which is my own family's experiences and my own self growing up. and that is not a historical novel but it gives us real people, who not everyone knows. so what is the ontological difference between a book using historically verifiable people that everyone knows and using one, a book that people that nobody knows? there is no basic ontological difference. so you can write about the past and is historical, verifiable characters, and still it is not a historical novel. finally, when the book is written falls away, like the author, and is only the books

own time, its own internal time that matters. >> let me try to other categories to see whether you would accept one or both of them. you mentioned time, measured by -- novelist who burrow into specific segment of time here in your case, it seems that most of your novels that i've read, i have read most of them, burrow into the period from roughly the first world war through roughly the second world war i. there in the '20s and 30s. but you have made that your own. i think of it as your world. the second element is that of the nature of your, the characters and scenes that you are dealing with. and there, you are the new york novelist in terms of the range and complexity.

an absolute fascination of the themes that you have developed. and i seem -- i don't see that as a modesty. i see that as your overworld. >> so you think i'm in new york novelist ben? >> i think you have captured so much of the reality of new york's. >> thank you. for a while there, people called me a new york novelist. i did publish a few books that take place in new york at different times. but i also have been called a political novelist, a postmodernist, ahistorical novels, a jewish novelist, and i tend to agree with any interpretation that anyone to put on as long as it is not exhaustive.

>> how about this one. doctor rose, the epic poet no one left since these can reduce blood novels without a point to stress that is an authentic way of confronting our own political in the present. >> i have to admit something here, that i don't -- i don't usually read a serious criticism of my work. i don't want to know too well what i am doing. [laughter] >> i am quite serious about that. it is a strange thing. as i mentioned henry james before the idea, the very hostess of the year, turned to revelations that you see into the unseen. i always felt that writing a

sentence from your imagination confirms a degree of perception that writing a sentence is purely factual does not. there is an endowment of that kind of thing, and you don't feel possessive about what you are writing. you make discoveries, just the way the reader does. as a matter of fact, you are the instant reader as you put the words down of what you are doing. and there is that association, and it also means, you know, you are not entirely in control and when the words are going you surprise yourself. and people find meanings in things in your books that you did not specifically consciously intend to put there, but which are there. and to read criticism is to sort

of screwed things up for you. the art is in really not being in total control of what comes out. the critics, when i used to grow, are called intentional fallacy as a writer would intend to write something, and that's not what the book was. so there was a fallacy even to have these intentions. you don't want any degree of self-consciousness about what you are doing. you have to respect, really respect the fact that it's not an entirely rational life you are leading. of course, the people you live with understand that very well. [laughter] >> i remember my wife, helen, who was asked to be on a radio

program years ago, living with an author. issues on their, and i think others were on. and a host of the program began this would. it is often said, she said, it is often said riders, that they are neurotic self interested inconsiderate broods who have absolutely no degree of gift or quality of living with any other human beings because they are so awful. and before she had even been introduced to the audience, but wife said oh, you know my husband? [laughter] >> so i don't mean to sound mystical or anything like that, but i am grateful for serious critical attention, but when someone sends me a book or peace or something, i thank them but i

don't read it. >> i have never heard anyone call you that. >> nuts and bolts question. some authors are absolutely categorical about writing one page a day or 2000 words, or whatever it is and stopping. others just go with the flow, whatever. their imagination brings, they write long, they write short, depending on the day and the topic and the rest. do you have a pattern? >> i think the important role is to work, go to work like everyone else does, every day. and if you miss a day, and it usually takes you two days to pick up. there are a lot of little rules.

hemingway was a great psychologist of writing. and he gave an interview in the paris review many years ago to george clinton. he said we stop when we know what is coming next. a very simple idea. and never reback more than a page or two before you begin the day's work. so many riders, they have 1500 pages, they sit down and read them all before they start to work. that's a mistake. so i'd like to work every day. it's really a noble profession if you think about it. dedicated, principled, selfish. i should warn you that when writers talk about their books and writing, they are continuing the process of fiction that they live by. >> let me try another quote on

your. on the eve of the 1992 election, doctor reminded readers what a bizarre and troubling pageant known as presidential elections matter so deeply. quoting you here. the president we get is the country we get. thanks in part to mass media infusion, one, for your term may find us at reasonable fees of one another. and the next, trampling on each other for scraps of bread. that was 1992. would you care to update that quote? >> i feel very strongly. this evening's meeting is the second most important in you can today. [laughter] >> i actually repeated those lines in a piece i wrote in 2004 protesting the war in iraq.

and i think that a lot of that piece began, that the president doesn't know what death is. and when eisenhower was sending everyone off on june 6, he was thinking about all the young man that would be killed in the invasion. he was in agony. he didn't make jokes. that little piece with those lines sort of caught fire on the internet, and to my astonishment. that was really what i learned what the internet could do. it was all over. thousands and thousands of sites. but it is true, the president we get is the country we get. and i think you all know how i

feel about this. i think this administration has been the most disastrous in the history of this country. [applause] >> that's not a particularly keen observation. i think a lot of people feel that way. almost every area of interest, in human life, has been somehow collected and then the policies of this administration, whether it is the economy, whether it is the environment, whether it is the war, whether it is civil rights. that's really appalling. i think we should all worry seriously about where our country is going.

what other cheerful things should we talk about? >> i want to talk about what other not so chervil thing, but that was in the news again in the last several weeks. you probably know what i'm referring to. he wrote an eloquent book, a number of years ago, called the book of daniel. and recognizing as i do, fiction is fiction and fact is fact. and matthew smith. and went combines them all and categorized, kind of novelist ur pic and in retrospect i would say you are an unpredictable novelist and it is my way of thinking, but a first rate novelist has to be using material from wherever they cannot necessarily divide them up into slicing them into fictional rows of material, factual rose. but as reflective as you are, in assessing these things, do you

have any further thoughts on the book of daniel? the case that inspired it? and your own perceptions of these matters. that is a very painful question for me to ask. >> i haven't recently read that book, but the fact is all of these revelations, code, documents and this latest confession, all of that is anticipated in the novel dirk it's all there. someone asked me what i write it differently now. i said no. this is what i mean by the endowment that fiction get you. figuring things out that you

don't have any factual knowledge of. but in the book, a reporter tells daniel who is the narrator, he is the son of the executed couple. your parents were framed but in this country people don't get picked out. your prayers have to be doing something he says. there is also some indication of the emotional distance that daniel's mother takes who apparently has not been totally informed about what his father has done as a spy. so it's all in the book. perhaps you'd be interested in how that came to be rewritten? >> that would be great. >> in the late 1960s, something called a new left,

more spontaneously as a result of the anger about the vietnam war. and i began to think about it, compared to the old left. the old left in the 1930s was this europeanized marxist theoretical, generally the old leftist were neither enthralled to the soviet union or schismatic embittered by the soviet union. it was all at that intellectual basis of utopian theory. where as the new left was in the spirit. it's genius was an orchid, but later it broke into various factions, one kind or another. but it's genius was totally, it came up out of the college

campuses and it came along with the music of rock and roll. and with closing changes, then begin to wear the hang longer than it got conflated with the civil rights movement. so i began to think, what better way to tell the story of my country life in 30, 40 year period than in terms of its dissidents? and i always had the idea that a novel is a large canvas. but you see, i didn't have a story. and went to rosenberg were executed, i was serving in the army in germany. i didn't pay that much attention. i had seen something about in stars & stripes. and then i thought that maybe the story that i can use to connect either the fulcrum between the '30s and '60s.

so that's how i landed on that case. i didn't know any of these people. i didn't know any of the prosecution. i start to read some transcrip transcripts, newspaper stories. and then i just started to write from the initial point of view. i put about 150 pages. and i read them, you know, that was part of the writing process to get to see what you are doing every once in while. and one day you devote to reading what you have got. and i read this material, and it was awful. i was bored. i fell into great despair. if i could make a story like this boring, i had no business being a writer. i remember i threw the pages across the room. i have never felt a greater moment of desolation in my life. and anger at myself.

i put a piece of paper and typewriter. that's overuse of those days people used typewriters. [laughter] and i started type something almost in mockery of my own pretensions as a writer. and what that turned out to be was the first page of "the book of daniel." i want this to me a while to figure out, i should write the book. daniel should write the book. the son of the murdered, executed couple should be in his adulthood, trying to reconcile himself with the life he had been given by his parents. so daniel was the answer as to how to get this book done, because he was intimate with what was going on as the novelist has to be when you are writing about something. but he was in the dark of what was going on, as i., in fact, as

the writer was as well. so by writing from his point of view i was able to develop this book. and people who haven't read it often think it's a defense, a simple minded defense of the rosenberg's, but it is not. it asks a different question. the question, what i discovered in writing the book, of the guilt or innocence, was not the question. it was not about them. it was about what happened to them. that case is an iconic portrait of the united states in the 1950s as a self-portrait of a time of total national psychosis. and that is what my book is about. and my book is about also the unconscionable, i feel, thing

that parents can do to the lives of their children based on their ideological fantasies. >> darkness at noon. the chapter on the jailing of the old bolsheviks were about to be tortured and executed. device they were all guilty, but not of the crimes of which they were charged. >> i think even people who feel, have always felt that the couple was guilty never thought they should have been executed. >> of course not. >> to talk not about the book but about them. these revelations indicate that yes, he was a spy, julius rosenberg. publishing was. she was executed from testimony

by her sister-in-law. that has been made clear. and he was not involved particularly in nuclear espionage. he was doing a lot of other things, radar, other kinds of weapons. but all that stuff sensitive treachery was done by a man named klaus fuchs, who ended up getting an eight-year prison sentence. the fact that matters nobody looks very good when you look at, of that case, certainly not the prosecution, circling of the judge who apparently wasn't some collusive extrajudicial conversation with the prosecution. certainly not roy cohn, who was daemonic and boasted about putting the idea of sentencing them to death. and judge kaufman's mind. answer cannot judge kaufman, who said that the rosenbergs were responsible for the korean war.

totally insane. everyone looks bad if you look at that case. everyone. >> i could continue my question for you for the next several hours, but we have a tradition here of inviting the audience to approach one of the microphones on the side. there is one over here and one over here. and join us. whatever questions you have your in the remaining time. so, do i see some people? there are some already. yes. >> i have to editorial type questions. >> breve was, we hope to. >> brief, yes. one is a works, which i just finished and love. i adjuster is why you chose to use ellipses all the time instead of commas. at a more substantive question is everyone thinks they are editors when they do their forward, but how do you react to editors?

>> images? >> editors. >> editors and ellipses and waterworks. >> start with ellipses. >> i'm sorry, but could you repeat that? i'm having a little trouble during. >> you use ellipses rather than commas and waterworks. why do you use ellipses in the book? is that they. >> isn't that correct? i just finished a. am i mixing it up with something else? and what works, the use of ellipses, the punctuation and what a works. >> no, that. >> and then how do you react to editors, editing your work? >> i don't let them. [laughter] >> you know why, i used to be an editor. and what i learned from that was to record my own work with the same objectivity i would read

other peoples work and consider it. so usually when i hand a book in, or most of the time, that's the book i want. and they seem to agree, usually. if you don't like my ellipses? >> first, i found it difficult, but i adjusted and i did love the book. >> good, i'm glad to hear that. usually people ask me about, well, i don't have any dark critical remarks over people's conversation. in some of my books. would you like to ask that question? [laughter] >> but, i'm serious about the ellipses. smack the ellipses is a mystery of long-standing and rather deep, and so the answer to that question, to your question is none of your business. [laughter] >> next. >> yes? >> i am a journalist trying to write not a historical play,

because i wouldn't based on what you said wouldn't use that term, but a play, the popper which occurred some time ago. as a journalist, particularly, i vessel constantly, even though all the characters are real in this play, i wrestle constantly with how closely i have to hew to their actual lives, in terms of their what's known about them. and if i should be in nursing myself in every document i can lay my hands on about these people to make sure that i don't make some sort of mistake. i think that is wrong i think you shouldn't have to even worry about something like that, but i guess because of my background i do. i would like to know how much you would about it. the book that i am thank out particularly is the march which i hugely enjoyed, but i take it you took a lot of liberties with in terms of the characters. and i wonder where, if anywhere,

you draw the line between what you would invent for historical character and what you feel you have to have somewhere on the record? >> well, there are several answers. you have asked a complex question. in the first place, i have done a lot of writers over the years who have researched things, with enormous, scrupulousness. and they have done exhaustive research. and then they began to try to write, and they can't. the weight of what they know from these sources is just -- throws their imagination. so you don't want to be an exhaustive. people asking, how much research do you do, and i said just

enough. just enough. the point of a novel, and i imagine a play, is among other things, it's an aesthetic system of opinions. and if i do a characterization of a historical verifiable figure, like general sherman in the march, it's equal to a painter making a portrait on an easel. there is a difference between that painting, which is interpretive and subjective, and it is as much about the paper as it is a subject. there is a difference between painting and the real thing. did you know that there is and historical society in england called king richard the third society. and their mission is to correct the terrible colony as

shakespeare's play. that they claim richard was badly maligned and libeled by shakespeare because he was actually a very good, wise king and he didn't kill those children and he wasn't a serial murder with a hunchback. and they have been working at that. [laughter] >> if they succeed ever, and they found out that shakespeare was in the thrall of thomas more was a publicist, on the wrong side of history, if they ever succeed there will be two richard the third. there will be the historical one and there will be shakespeare's. and who do you think is more viable? it's one of the most popular place that he has written, and it instructs us on the desire of

everyone to live preemptively at the expense of other people. and that is a great moral tragedy, that played. so he didn't worry about sticking too close to the facts. he found something that suited him and he did it. in war and peace which i mentioned before, tolstoy describes napoleon as a fat little guy with quivering thighs who can't sit on a horse properly. he left -- that happens to be fairly accurate about napoleon's physique, but he made the point that the disparity between what napoleon was physically and what he did in that disparity with the thousands of dead bodies of soldiers all over europe. tolstoy did his research, but he had an opinion about napoleon.

so i'm really throwing these big guns at you now, but you mustn't be overwhelmed. i mean, even i, whenever i have time, i have a little fun with jp morgan. but the thing is that famous people usually make fictions of themselves long before the riders get to them. [laughter] >> and if you want to read real fiction about morgan, read his authorized biography. [laughter] >> i think i've said enough. >> you said you write everyday. can you give us a clue as to what's coming up next from you? ended separately, of everything you've written in the past,

what's been the thing you are most happy with? >> i will give you clues as to what i'm running out is another great novel. [laughter] >> you want to know the particular one book you should read, is that it? why bother? adventuring into reading and figuring out for yourself. you want a label. you want the one book that is worth reading, is that it? well, let's see. no, i don't think you should do that one. "the book of daniel," it was kind of grim, collocated book, postmodern devices and it. forget that one. "ragtime," that is sort of mock

historical time. i don't think that's for you either. [laughter] >> let's see. i don't think any of them are for you. [laughter] >> do you have any children? who is a person who asked a question? do you have any children? >> no. >> i was going to ask if you have children, which one is your favorite? it's not a question that most writers would care to answer. yes, ma'am. >> i have been taking rebuys about writing, and i put the research on way for the most part, and have been riding pretty religiously everyday. but i found i had to take a break for personal reasons. but my question to you is as i read your short story, i know you like to get in the saddle and stay in it, but i read your short story in the new yorker about february. and the name escapes me at this time. it's about the guy who hides out in his garage.

>> which is where was that? >> the man who leaves home and he hides out in the garage. was the name. >> it's called wakefield. >> wakefield. i couldn't believe it. i couldn't believe you pulled that off. did you write it in the middle of writing a novel? did you take time off from writing a novel and do that? >> sometimes it's a good thing to do to run away from a novel for it while. and write something that you think has nothing to do with it. and usually that story has nothing to do with a novel. but somehow, it's useful to you. but i have to tell you, that hawthorne wrote a story called wakefield, nathaniel hawthorne. it's about an englishman in the 18th century in london says goodbye to his wife one day and leaves. and doesn't come back for 20 years. he has taken place about a block away. and during that story, hovland says that the reader meditate on that insanity. so i said, all right, i will do

that. so this story is mike loss on the hawthorne story. what was your question? >> well, the question was, it was a total escape. it was a total escape and i know that's not what you are right about in your novel. i don't know what your novel is about. but i knew that was a great departure. and so i'm sitting here giving myself time off for good behavior, but also thinking that maybe it's time to be read what i have got because i start having anxiety about pacing, about the ships and point of view, things that maybe are better left for the end of the novel when i'm finished? >> ladies and gentlemen, you heard the voice of a writer. the troubles, the difficulties, the hazards, the misery, the torment.

just press on, my dear. press on. >> last question. >> you have written everything before world war i up to the 1930s, 40s and on. your personal history moments, what memories do you have of american history that stay with you? >> what memories? >> yes, sir. what personal moments. >> well, i remember where i was when jack kennedy was killed. i was in an office on madison avenue. that's the kind of thing you want to know? i remember as a little boy when franklin roosevelt died, and everyone around me was crying. all the adults were crying. so i started to cry also. i remember when world war ii was

over, how happy we all were. i remember how nervous we all were when the standoff when khrushchev sent those missiles to cuba, and there were few really grim days. we thought we would all be blown away, nuclear bombs. it's just things that happen. i mean, i don't even think of these things as history. actually just things in our lives that, you know, a young person, person born 15 years ago, my grandchildren would think of these things i just mentioned as history. but i don't. things that happened. >> i wrote a story -- >> when my children were born, i loved that each time. that was great.

is that history? in his life. >> i'm going to give you a copy, if prologue which is quarterly magazine you. i wrote up my experiences of an eight year old, the day he died, with the entire country we've been trying to puzzle through what was going on your and it's a close as i've ever come to writing something fictional. but it was back. >> great moments. >> clasclass. .

apodaca wamp who won and history writing, i think the objective of ways. meek he nsa that the objective place is a fictional device. and a french critic said him something that i extrapolate this way someone came down from

another planet you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the storytelling of the novelist and the storytelling of the fiction and he said there can be no facts without meaning so what fact as the historian choose to put together to create his picture, his understanding, his interpretation and what fact does he leave out? misfud this genial collegial argument with many historians and there is no way to settle this discussion. they're really isn't. but i'm committed to the idea that there is -- storytelling is the most ancient system of knowledge that we have, and

there's some stories in the bronx where people put the bible of the old testament together working on their system that it was the only system they had, and so there's audience was religious. they didn't separate the function of language like we do so we have science and religion and daily communication, poetry, all these things, but in the bronze age, they were refused. there were no differences among these things and so they were able to pass along information to educate the young, to connect the visible to the invisible, the past to the present, and to distribute the sufferings so it could be born. so, the very act of telling a

story had the presumption of truth, very active telling meant it was the truth, but then along came the enlightenment and galileo and bacon said to you have to make observations and prove things to make them true. at that point storytelling lost its authority and today it's only children who believe the act of telling a story carries with it presumption of truth. children and fundamentalists. [laughter] but greens are still watered for storytelling, and we know that because for several years the social scientists and psychologists and the anthropologists have all invaded the territory of the fiction

writers. if you read freud's case studies they are wonderful stories. and ethnic portraits done by some of the sociologists. they were all moved in on the territory, put on a reservation somehow. so, i remember feeling that very strongly when i wrote "ragtime." i was living in a world of empirical domination, and so i said to myself if they want facts, i'm going to give them facts. i will give them the facts that will knock their eyes out. >> so a historian who began a book as i did once upon a time would be living in his own archaic fantasy world can't do that any longer, storytelling doesn't work that way. i think your own work this

proves that. we would like before we close this off to present something to you and i want to read a little something that looks present that first. >> we would like to present you with copies of records from the national archives that might tie in to some of your work and some parts of your life. first we have a telegram written by a german that would tie in to your book, march. it telegraph from lincoln december 22nd 1864 in which he basically says i beg to present as a christmas gift the city of savannah so that's the first record we have come a copy of it. second -- >> they are not originals. don't think we are taking a originals. [laughter] >> next we have relating to the book of daniel rosenberg exhibit number 33 imitation of raspberry flavored jell-o box. roy cohen is selecting but

basically evidence used to help prosecute how they were passing secrets. there's the jell-o. third tidying into your love of new york this is an image we have a flag making, selling flags at the new york navy yard in 1940. and it's a rather visually arresting image of seamstresses selling on the stars. last by understand you have a passion for tennis, as we have a patent for a tennis racket, 1905 and i am sure it was the similar tennis racket they were using in your characters from ragtime. so here we are. >> thank you. [applause] >> the next time you come back we have a selection of the 1 billion documents we have here. >> i was just thinking you know there's a children's playground on the west side of central park

named the general sherman playground. you might think that is an odd name for a children's playground, a man who wreaked devastation through georgia and the carolinas but the reason that is there is because sherman moved to new york to be with his son the last year of his life and he lived on west 71st street and he died there so they named this little playground general william tecumseh playground, sherman playground, and since it is in new york of course some people have protested that shouldn't be the name of the child's play ground. why did i tell you that? [laughter] >> while you are reflecting on that let me read a passage from one of your essays by way of concluding this evening. this is our guest.

the voice of the constitution is a quiet voice. it does not rally, it does not call on self-evident truth, it does not argue, ex plan, condemn, excuse or justified. the voice of the constitution is the inescapable solemn self consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves. the constitution is just a few feet away from where we are right now that is a good place to stop this evening and thank everybody for coming and hope that you will come do this again and thank our guest. [applause] >> thank you for this. [inaudible conversations]

>> this event was part of the national archives american conversation series. for more on the archives and the defense held, visit archives.gov. the publishing and printing twelve. garrey bernstein as publicity director at twelve. what are some of the books you have coming out in the later 20009? >> welcome this summer we are publishing a waxman's the waxman report in july. it is a look back at some of the landmark legislation the

congressman has been involved with, tobacco, clean air common nutritional labels and what he does is explains to us how coalitions are built, how bills get moved from subcommittees to the kennedys. you collect votes. and it's really a lookout sausages made and of course the congressman has a couple of big bills going to the floor this summer so we expect a lot of attention from that. >> did you approach henry waxman or did he approach you? >> or publisher approached him and thought he would be the perfect person to explain how congress works, and i should add ghosh green from atlantic monthly has done a fantastic job. >> another book by peter peterson. >> pete peterson has lived a fairly phenomenal life. born 1926 raised by greek immigrants, born into the depression era in nebraska, worked at his father's donner, found himself the secretary of commerce for mix in, chairman ceo of lehman brothers and later

co-founded the group and here we are in the greatest recession since the great depression and he has brought a sort of bird's-eye view on this that few people would have. >> who is poll bronson and ashley merriam and? >> journalist and writer author of the number-one bestseller what shall i do with my life. ashley is a science journalist and they have taken a look much else for the economy and as a treatment for globalization. they are taking a cultural look the way we raise children and what they've discovered as there are certain key twists that science has overlooked and recent research shows that conventional wisdom of raising our kids is wrong so they want a national magazine for a piece they did. it turns out for example that we don't think that they get a sense of confidence. they are very bright and good looking. overpraising your children studies will show in fact make your children less inclined to attempt to do things they don't

think they are good at and furthermore more inclined to cheat. there are also chapters on siblings. there are chapters on gifted programs, testing for private schools. it turns out the testing for gifted programs they do in kindergarten and testing for private schools, they've retested a lot of these kids, three, four years later and they found that they have misplaced these kids 73% of the time. three years later the have developed differently in a different rate, 73% of these kids shouldn't be in the programs they are in. >> is it risky in today's economy to publish only 12 books a year? >> i think it makes a lot of sense because we -- i've talked about this with you before we put all our energy, marketing publicity editorial on one of the full month. we are not distracted by other campaigns and we can be creative and not just published a book one way that published one book several ways. a good example is robert feldman, the lawyer in your life. on the other hand this is about

deception. robert is one of the leading authorities on deception. he's the chair of the department of behavioral science, and -- sorry, i'm blanking. when he was the young assistant professor he went to the national archives because he thought he would listen to the nixon tapes and go to the greatest wire ever and what he discovered was remarkable even he and an expert couldn't tell when nixon was being truthful or not so the book isn't about the sort of made offer clinton why is it is about the lies we tell every day each of us on average three flies every ten minutes. nice to see you, you look good, i feel well. the more lies we are told the level of our own increase. clinically depressed people have more accurate views of themselves than powerful people who tend to maintain a facade of strength to maintain their

ambition. so it covers all these things but it's not just about the sort of small lie is that how to handle lies in the office, the bedroom, dinner table. but we published this is a psychology book, a book about business, book about becoming a more honest person yourself. >> how far in advance do you plan your 12 books a year? >> well, we have acquired -- we have books scheduled through next august -- >> august 2010? >> yes, we are scheduled through august, 2010. model of the manuscript have been delivered yet but we know what's coming up and there is great stuff coming up throughout this next year. >> as an acquiring editor and editor, what do you do? >> most of my job, 90% of my job is spent promoting the books, but i also have the opportunity