E.L. Doctorow '52 celebrated as first recipient of Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement
On the evening of November 12, 2002, E.L. Doctorow became the first recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, honoring careers dedicated to excellence, to a creative spirit surpassing mere fashion or brief commercial appeal.
"The idea for the award arose during a larger discussion among the Kenyon Review's trustees about contemporary literature and literary publishing," says David H. Lynn '76, editor of the Kenyon Review and professor of English at the College. "The trustees came to believe this is an appropriate moment for an award such as this, one that will be welcome, indeed important, to a national audience.
"It seems especially fitting that Edgar Doctorow, an alumnus of Kenyon and a student of John Crowe Ransom, the Kenyon Review's founder, should be the first writer to receive the award," adds Lynn. "His works have lifted us all by the power of his imagination, the beauty of his art and innovation, the courage of his uncompromising vision."
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| Matt Winkler, E.L. Doctorow, Mayor Bloomberg, and David Lynn |
"When I was a student at Kenyon, we wrote poetry there they way they played football at Ohio State," Doctorow said at the dinner. "We longed for a nod of approval from John Crowe Ransom, our teacher and the founding editor of the Kenyon Review. But it was beyond even longing to think of being published in the Review, a journal so far up in the empyrean heights of literary life that to buy a copy and walk around with it was to warrant its talismanic power."
Before concluding his remarks with thanks to the trustees of the Review, Doctorow spoke of the continuing importance of the Kenyon Review and its peers. "The small literary review that circulates the work of our intellectuals and artists is, along with the independent newspaper or journal of opinion, of critical importance to a society conforming dangerously to the intellectual, political, and artistic standards of mass media. Only a multiplicity of witness, a dispersion of forums, assures the creation of the self-revising consensual reality that we define as a democratic republic."
Among those who feted Doctorow were George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, and Roger Rosenblatt, columnist for Time and commentator on the PBS "Newshour with Jim Lehrer." Rosenblatt, who is also a professor at Southampton College of Long Island University, began his remarks with a reading of John Crowe Ransom's "Survey of Literature," a poem, as Rosenblatt noted, "on the subject of writers and dinners" (remembered fondly by generations of students for the couplet, "In all the good Greek of Plato, I lack my roast beef and potato").
"Not only is he a lovable person," said Rosenblatt of Doctorow, "he is an enthralling storyteller. He stands in a line of literature's best storytellers that wends from Homer to Chaucer to Fielding to Thackeray, Conrad, Dostoevsky, and Twain and Jack London and Hemingway: the great moral storytellers.
"As a teller of stories, Edgar is the essential person, the indispensable representative of the sort of animal we are," aded Rosenblatt. "We are a narrative species. We like to promote ourselves as a rational species, but current events would suggest otherwise. We're a narrative species. We keep telling the story of our being. One day we may get it right."
Making a surprise appearance at the dinner was New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Many others who count themselves among Doctorow's friends and fans, as well as Doctorow's wife, Helen, and other family members, were also on hand for the event.
The evening included an auction, conducted by Dean Failey of Christie's, Inc., for the benefit of the Kenyon Review. Zachys donated a nine-liter bottle of 1998 Chateau Hautbrion (Graves) and a six-liter bottle of 1994 Chateau Yquem, and celebrity photographer Patrick McMullan donated his portrait of Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs. Donations provided by the trustees of the Kenyon Review included first editions of the Doctorow novels Ragtime (1975), Loon Lake (1980), Billy Bathgate (1989), and an advanced reader's edition and an uncorrected proof of Doctorow's 1971 novel The Book of Daniel.
Members of the Honoring Committee, which assisted in planning and publicizing the award dinner, included Robert Altman, Sam Cohn, Galway Kinnell, George Labalme '50, Victor Navasky, Plimpton, Rosenblatt, and Susan Sontag.
At $1,000 per person, the event netted more than $160,000 for the endowment of the Kenyon Review. That endowment, which now stands at more than $1 million, already provides a measure of financial independence that few, if any, other literary journals can match. The goal is to raise a total of $3 million within the next three years.