RIP E.L. Doctorow: 'What is the matter with my heart?'

We have a need to categorize everything and everyone, so the obituary writers call E.L. Doctorow, who died Tuesday at 84, an author of "historical fiction."

What Doctorow did in his great books was something much more profound, however, a type of artistic alchemy, mixing fact with imagination and turning it into literary gold.

The novelist Don DeLillo said that Doctorow's work reflects "the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history... Doctorow's prose tends to create its own landscape, and to become a force that works in opposition to the power of social reality."

It's there in "The Book of Daniel," my favorite of his works. And in "World's Fair." And "Ragtime." And "The March." And "Lives of the Poets."

And the rest.

Doctorow said once, "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

It's true of writing. Also of life.

He also said, "The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like."

For those who have admired Doctorow's work for decades it's difficult to explain what his passing feels like. But it's got to be close to this passage from "The Book of Daniel:"

"IT SO TERRIBLE NOT TO KEEP THE MATTER IN MY HEART, TO GET THE MATTER OUT OF MY HEART, TO EMPTY MY HEART OF THIS MATTER? WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH MY HEART?"