Homer & Langley: A Novel
Amazon Exclusive: E.L. Doctorow onHomer &   LangleyE. L. Doctorow's novels includeThe   March,City of God,The Waterworks,Welcome to Hard Times,The Book of Daniel,Ragtime,Loon Lake,Lives of the Poets,World's Fair, andBilly Bathgate. His work has been published   in thirty-two languages. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics   Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean   Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National   Humanities Medal. E. L. Doctorow lives in New York. Read his exclusive Amazon essay onHomer   & Langley:I was a teenager when the Collyer brothers were found dead in their Fifth Avenue brownstone.   Instantly, they were folklore. And so there is the real historical existence of them and the   mythological existence--two existences, as with Abe Lincoln, though of a less exalted standing. I   didn’t know at the time that I would someday write about them, but even then I felt there was some   secret to the Collyers--there was something about them still to be discovered under the piles of   things in their house--the bales of newspapers and the accumulated detritus of their lives. Was it   only that they were junk-collecting eccentrics? You see that every day in the streets of New York.   They had opted out--that was the primary fact. Coming from a well-to-do family, with every   advantage, they had locked the door and closed the shutters and absented themselves from the life   around them. A major move, as life-transforming as emigration. In fact it was a form of emigration,   of leave-taking. But where to? What country was within that house? What would have caused them to   become the notorious recluses of Fifth Avenue? As myths, the brothers demanded not research but   interpretation, and when a few years ago I was finally moved to do this book, I felt as if writing   it was an act of breaking and entering just to see what may have been going on in that house, which   really meant getting inside two very interesting minds. And with the first sentence, “I’m Homer, the   blind brother,” I was in.In one sense I think ofHomer & Langleyas a road novel--as if they are two people   traveling together down a road and having adventures, though in fact they are housebound. It turns   out that the world will not let them alone--others intrude on their privacy as if it is the road   running through them. As for their collecting, I think of them as curators of their life and times,   and their house as a museum of all our lives. That is my idea of them, that is my reading of the   Collyer myth. I make them to be two brothers who opted out of civilization and pulled the world in   after them.--E.L. Doctorow(Photo © Philip Friedman)--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.