Homer & Langley

Homer & Langley
Name	Homer & Langley
Author	E. L. Doctorow
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Historical fiction
Publisher	Random House
Pub date	2009
Pages	304
Isbn	9780812974423

Homer & Langley is a 2009 historical novel by E. L. Doctorow that fictionalizes the lives of the Collyer brothers, inhabitants of Harlem and later Upper West Side, Manhattan, whose fame stems from a 1947 discovery of their hoarded home. The novel uses a fictional narrator and blends documented events with imaginative invention, engaging figures and settings such as New York City, Great Depression, World War II, and institutions like Columbia University and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Doctorow situates the story amid American cultural touchstones including Prohibition, Roosevelt administration, Gilded Age legacies, and the urban transformations of the twentieth century.

Background and Sources

Doctorow drew on contemporary reportage and archival material concerning the Collyer brothers and related legal proceedings, including press accounts from the New York Times, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and legal records held by New York County Supreme Court. He also engaged secondary scholarship on urban history found in works associated with Lewis Mumford, Kenneth T. Jackson, and Robert Caro to frame the narrative within larger processes like urban renewal and demographic shifts tied to Great Migration. Doctorow acknowledged influences from novelists and historians such as James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Mark Twain, and John Dos Passos in experimenting with voice and chronology. The novel’s intertextuality references artistic and cultural institutions—Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and New York Public Library—and draws on archival photographs, police reports, and municipal censuses from 1890 United States census through 1950 United States census for period detail.

Plot Summary

The narrator, an elderly footnote to history, recounts the lives of two reclusive brothers who move through a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York shaped by events like Stock Market Crash of 1929, Prohibition in the United States, and World War II. The brothers’ trajectories intersect with urban elites and institutions such as Columbia University, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Madison Square Garden, and social crises including the Great Depression and public health campaigns of the New Deal. Scenes depict encounters with figures and milieus associated with Harlem Renaissance, Tin Pan Alley, and the rise of radio broadcasting and mass media exemplified by outlets like NBC and Columbia Broadcasting System. The plot moves from genteel beginnings through increasingly eccentric seclusion, culminating in the discovery by authorities from New York City Police Department and municipal responders that reveals layers of accumulation and loss.

Characters

Doctorow’s principal figures are drawn from the Collyer mythos but renamed and reimagined as siblings whose personalities evoke cultural archetypes found in biographies of figures like Phineas Taylor Barnum, Edgar Allan Poe, and Howard Hughes. Secondary characters include relatives and professionals: lawyers connected to the New York Bar Association, physicians trained at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Bellevue Hospital, social workers influenced by reformers like Jane Addams, and journalists from periodicals such as Life (magazine), Time (magazine), and The New Yorker. The novel features cameo-like allusions to public intellectuals and artists including Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso, Aaron Copland, and performers tied to Broadway and Radio City Music Hall, whose cultural presence frames the brothers’ isolation.

Themes and Style

Major themes include obsession and accumulation, privacy and exposure, and the tension between modernity and nostalgia, paralleling narratives in books by William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Pynchon. Doctorow employs a first-person, retrospective voice that blends documentary citation and lyrical digression, echoing techniques from Gustave Flaubert and Virginia Woolf. The prose juxtaposes legalistic detail—evoking institutions like the New York Court of Appeals—with surreal episodes reminiscent of Magic realism traditions associated with Gabriel García Márquez. Urban topography is rendered with references to transit systems such as the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation, cultural landmarks like Central Park and Carnegie Hall, and social policy moments linked to the Tennessee Valley Authority and Social Security Act.

Critical Reception

Upon publication, the novel was reviewed by outlets including The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and literary journals such as The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. Critics compared Doctorow’s fictional reconstruction to biographies and reportage on the Collyer brothers and to historical novels by Hilary Mantel, Salman Rushdie, and Philip Roth. The book received nominations and awards consideration from bodies like the National Book Foundation and drew praise for its imaginative scope while prompting debate about ethics of fictionalizing real lives.

Controversies and Historical Accuracy

Scholars and commentators debated Doctorow’s liberties with documented facts, contrasting the novel’s inventions with archival materials in New York Public Library and reports by the New York City Health Department. Critics cited tensions similar to disputes over historical novels about figures addressed in works on Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and J. Edgar Hoover: the line between creative license and factual fidelity. Legal historians pointed to discrepancies with coroner’s reports and municipal filings preserved at the New York Municipal Archives, prompting discussions in forums such as panels at Columbia University and symposia organized by the Modern Language Association.

Adaptations and Influence

While no major motion-picture adaptation has been produced, the novel’s cultural footprint appeared in theater readings, radio dramatizations on stations affiliated with National Public Radio, and academic syllabi at institutions including Yale University, Harvard University, and New York University. The book influenced subsequent fictionalizations of urban eccentricity in works by writers like Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, and Nicole Krauss, and informed curatorial projects at museums such as The New-York Historical Society and exhibitions referencing hoarding and urban material culture.

Category:2009 novels Category:Novels by E. L. Doctorow