The title of the collection is, of course, a shot across the bow of cultural conservatives. Though no single essay takes up the debate on evolution, Mr. Doctorow is clearly ready to pit the imaginative power of artistic “creationists” against scriptural literalists. The book’s opening essay does take up the case for “Genesis,” but primarily for the “staying power” of its stories and the way that, when reading them, “in reverence or in ethical action do our troubled conflicted minds find holiness.” Meanwhile, in the essay on Poe that follows, it would seem no accident that Mr. Doctorow embraces “the metaphysical disquiet that comes with a secular democracy, a country written down on paper, a country in a covenant not with God but with itself.”

Most of the pieces in Creationists were originally commissioned as lectures, reviews or introductions, and in this they share a kind of generalist gestalt. What lifts them above mere appreciation is the view from the writer’s desk, what Mr. Doctorow describes in his fascinating speculations on the composition of Moby-Dick as “a parable of the grubbiness and glory of the writer’s mind.”

Like most writers writing on other writers, Mr. Doctorow is at his best when touching upon concerns he has taken up in his own work. In reading about “the world of two distinct and, for the most part, irreconcilable life forms, the Child and the Adult” in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, we’re reminded of the child’s view of complex historical events so prevalent in Mr. Doctorow’s own novels. Similarly, his observation that Sinclair Lewis’ “satiric impulse … prevails, sometimes at the expense of the credibility of the work” only underscores the way in which Mr. Doctorow’s fiction presses the envelope of historical credibility in the pursuit of mythic truth.

A somewhat odd manifestation of Mr. Doctorow’s “presumptive nationalism” is his seeming ambivalence towards European writers. After dissecting Kafka’s “mordant metaphysics of the emptiness of human striving,” he asks: “Why, for instance, can there not be consolation in the however imperfect American pursuit of a just social order?” The question would seem misplaced, if not mistaken. Also, his observation that the continent depicted in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants seems “used up—used up by all the living that has been done on it, all the armies that have trod upon it, all the blood that has poured into it” disingenuously ignores the original way in which Sebald came to write about it.

E.L. Doctorow is an American writer through and through. In arguing that “Dos Passos’ self-effacement … masks an imperial intelligence, an acerbic wit, a great anger,” the author touches upon a lineage that runs from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Melville to Twain and right on down to himself. And yet he’s no apologist. He’s quick to criticize Hemingway as “morally speaking, an isolationist,” or even to diss Poe’s most famous poem: “‘The Raven’ is to poetry as Ravel’s Boléro is to music: rhythmic and hypnotic on first hearing, a mere novelty everafter.”

Quips aside, the predominant means of engagement in Creationists is sympathy in its truest sense. When employing it, Mr. Doctorow raises his subjects to a higher plane, such as when writing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early demise: “We have to smile in our sadness for our graying Jazz Age kid. Such bitter resolution is not characteristic of the psychological breakdown, the depleted vitality of the depressive. It is more the angry romantic’s expression of inconsolability—in having had an innocence and, having lost it, having to mourn it. That progression of states of the American mind was prevalent once upon a time, but now, after a century of industrialized war and genocide, is itself to be mourned.”

This last turn marks Mr. Doctorow at his best: sympathetic towards the life, insightful on the literature, incisive on its place in the American story. His essay on “The Bomb” reaches further abroad to muse trenchantly that “this blood-besotted century, having with its technology erased the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, will continue, as in the Cold War, to erase the distinction between wartime and peacetime.”

But there’s far more devotion than doomsday in these essays. As Mr. Doctorow says of Einstein’s genius, “Acts of mind always come without a rating,” and in both the genuineness and generosity of his thought, E.L. Doctorow reveals himself to be wholly taken over by his passionate engagement with the writers that have meant most to him. We as readers are the direct beneficiaries, for through his intelligence and discernment, the heart and soul of these “creationists” is revealed on every page.

Peter Filkins teaches writing and literature at Simon’s Rock College of Bard.

The title of the collection is, of course, a shot across the bow of cultural conservatives. Though no single essay takes up the debate on evolution, Mr. Doctorow is clearly ready to pit the imaginative power of artistic “creationists” against scriptural literalists. The book’s opening essay does take up the case for “Genesis,” but primarily for the “staying power” of its stories and the way that, when reading them, “in reverence or in ethical action do our troubled conflicted minds find holiness.” Meanwhile, in the essay on Poe that follows, it would seem no accident that Mr. Doctorow embraces “the metaphysical disquiet that comes with a secular democracy, a country written down on paper, a country in a covenant not with God but with itself.”

Most of the pieces in Creationists were originally commissioned as lectures, reviews or introductions, and in this they share a kind of generalist gestalt. What lifts them above mere appreciation is the view from the writer’s desk, what Mr. Doctorow describes in his fascinating speculations on the composition of Moby-Dick as “a parable of the grubbiness and glory of the writer’s mind.”

Like most writers writing on other writers, Mr. Doctorow is at his best when touching upon concerns he has taken up in his own work. In reading about “the world of two distinct and, for the most part, irreconcilable life forms, the Child and the Adult” in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, we’re reminded of the child’s view of complex historical events so prevalent in Mr. Doctorow’s own novels. Similarly, his observation that Sinclair Lewis’ “satiric impulse … prevails, sometimes at the expense of the credibility of the work” only underscores the way in which Mr. Doctorow’s fiction presses the envelope of historical credibility in the pursuit of mythic truth.

A somewhat odd manifestation of Mr. Doctorow’s “presumptive nationalism” is his seeming ambivalence towards European writers. After dissecting Kafka’s “mordant metaphysics of the emptiness of human striving,” he asks: “Why, for instance, can there not be consolation in the however imperfect American pursuit of a just social order?” The question would seem misplaced, if not mistaken. Also, his observation that the continent depicted in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants seems “used up—used up by all the living that has been done on it, all the armies that have trod upon it, all the blood that has poured into it” disingenuously ignores the original way in which Sebald came to write about it.

E.L. Doctorow is an American writer through and through. In arguing that “Dos Passos’ self-effacement … masks an imperial intelligence, an acerbic wit, a great anger,” the author touches upon a lineage that runs from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Melville to Twain and right on down to himself. And yet he’s no apologist. He’s quick to criticize Hemingway as “morally speaking, an isolationist,” or even to diss Poe’s most famous poem: “‘The Raven’ is to poetry as Ravel’s Boléro is to music: rhythmic and hypnotic on first hearing, a mere novelty everafter.”

Quips aside, the predominant means of engagement in Creationists is sympathy in its truest sense. When employing it, Mr. Doctorow raises his subjects to a higher plane, such as when writing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early demise: “We have to smile in our sadness for our graying Jazz Age kid. Such bitter resolution is not characteristic of the psychological breakdown, the depleted vitality of the depressive. It is more the angry romantic’s expression of inconsolability—in having had an innocence and, having lost it, having to mourn it. That progression of states of the American mind was prevalent once upon a time, but now, after a century of industrialized war and genocide, is itself to be mourned.”

This last turn marks Mr. Doctorow at his best: sympathetic towards the life, insightful on the literature, incisive on its place in the American story. His essay on “The Bomb” reaches further abroad to muse trenchantly that “this blood-besotted century, having with its technology erased the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, will continue, as in the Cold War, to erase the distinction between wartime and peacetime.”

But there’s far more devotion than doomsday in these essays. As Mr. Doctorow says of Einstein’s genius, “Acts of mind always come without a rating,” and in both the genuineness and generosity of his thought, E.L. Doctorow reveals himself to be wholly taken over by his passionate engagement with the writers that have meant most to him. We as readers are the direct beneficiaries, for through his intelligence and discernment, the heart and soul of these “creationists” is revealed on every page.

Peter Filkins teaches writing and literature at Simon’s Rock College of Bard.

But first, the facts we do know: On March 18, 1741, fire erupted at Fort George on the southern tip of the island, burning the lieutenant governor’s mansion to the ground. Over the next few weeks, nine other major fires occurred, all of them involving properties owned by slaveholders. At one scene, a slave named Cuffee was seen running away and later apprehended. Another slave, Quack, was heard walking through the streets, exclaiming, “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch, A Little, Damn it, By-And-By.” In addition, two weeks before the first fires, a burglary was committed by two slaves, Caesar and Prince; the loot later turned up in the cellar of John Hughson’s tavern, where Peggy Kerry lived, an Irish prostitute who had just given birth to Caesar’s child. Months before, Hughson also seems to have played host to a gathering of slaves over Christmas dinner. Just what was said and sworn to at that meeting would become the tinder for the panic, fear and revenge that would sweep through a city with 10,000 inhabitants, one-fifth of whom served as human chattel.

The meager facts wouldn’t seem to justify assumptions about an organized conspiracy—assumptions which soon led to the arrest of 152 black New Yorkers (80 of whom signed confessions), followed by the death by hanging and burning at the stake of 30 blacks and four whites, including Hughson. However, Ms. Lepore demonstrates that history happens not out in the open, but under the floorboards: Beneath the public’s fear that slaves were plotting lay the nascent infighting of Colonial party politics.

Daniel Horsmanden, the presiding Superior Court judge who led the investigation and would later write the only account that survives of the events, was after more than just truth in the proceedings. His own political gain rested upon asserting “not only the authority of the Supreme Court but also its transcendence over party loyalties.” The latter were created in the 1730’s, when James Alexander founded the opposition Country Party in protesting the repressive reign of Governor William Cosby. Cosby’s successor, George Clarke, whose authority was also challenged for a time, later appointed Horsmanden judge, while Alexander also served as an attorney in Horsmanden’s court. Thus, 40 years before the Revolution, partisan politics was born.

Ms. Lepore argues that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and that perhaps the most troubling paradox of the conspiracy trials of 1741 is how the fundamental liberty of the American political system was nurtured into existence by slavery. “Alexander’s political party plotted to depose the governor; the city’s slaves, allegedly, plotted to kill him,” Ms. Lepore observes. “The difference made Alexander’s opposition seem, relative to slave rebellion, harmless, and in so doing made the world safer for democracy.” Troubling as this last phrase has come to sound, there’s a clarity to the author’s insight that opens up the episode to the long view that history can sometimes grant us. Meanwhile, the tragedy lies in the human price paid. Put another way, the liberty gained seems in itself hollow when leading so quickly to court cases argued by posse and confessions obtained at the end of a rope.

Compelling as Ms. Lepore’s thesis may be on the growth of American political liberty, her focus upon it often gets skewed or distracted amid the clutter of her narrative. Too often, she interrupts her argument to provide deep background that, although interesting, makes it hard to keep the sequence of players and events straight. Writing about the fire at Fort George, she stops to tell the history of fire brigades and firefighting equipment in New York. After observing that Horsmanden owned no slaves, she goes on for two pages about the legalities of willing slaves as property and the nature of slave burials. In addition, her conflation of alleged meetings and events before the trials and the unfolding of the cases themselves is at times kaleidoscopic, while even the linkages between 1730’s party politics and the conspiracy come to feel tenuous amid too much forced shuffling back and forth. This, of course, supports the observation that what actually happened is “maddeningly unknowable,” but Ms. Lepore risks making it even more so.

She writes: “That abject bondage contributed to the creation of the world’s first modern democracy, however true and even self-evident, is, finally, so painful a truth as to be nearly unfathomable.” Nearly unfathomable, but not entirely—the urge to comprehend painful truths is one reason why history is written and read. And the fact that racism and human degradation contributed to this country’s good fortune is inarguable. Jill Lepore’s history of a few months of mass hysteria in Colonial New York underscores the fact that our legacy is a troubled one.

A final irony: The human remains excavated in 1991 from the 18th-century Negroes Burial Ground were almost lost in the collapse of the World Trade Center. They were at last reburied in 2003, at the original site on Chambers Street—a Pyrrhic victory for those lost to a history they never had the chance to write.

Peter Filkins teaches writing and literature at Simon’s Rock College of Bard.

But first, the facts we do know: On March 18, 1741, fire erupted at Fort George on the southern tip of the island, burning the lieutenant governor’s mansion to the ground. Over the next few weeks, nine other major fires occurred, all of them involving properties owned by slaveholders. At one scene, a slave named Cuffee was seen running away and later apprehended. Another slave, Quack, was heard walking through the streets, exclaiming, “ Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch, A Little, Damn it, By-And-By.” In addition, two weeks before the first fires, a burglary was committed by two slaves, Caesar and Prince; the loot later turned up in the cellar of John Hughson’s tavern, where Peggy Kerry lived, an Irish prostitute who had just given birth to Caesar’s child. Months before, Hughson also seems to have played host to a gathering of slaves over Christmas dinner. Just what was said and sworn to at that meeting would become the tinder for the panic, fear and revenge that would sweep through a city with 10,000 inhabitants, one-fifth of whom served as human chattel.

The meager facts wouldn’t seem to justify assumptions about an organized conspiracy—assumptions which soon led to the arrest of 152 black New Yorkers (80 of whom signed confessions), followed by the death by hanging and burning at the stake of 30 blacks and four whites, including Hughson. However, Ms. Lepore demonstrates that history happens not out in the open, but under the floorboards: Beneath the public’s fear that slaves were plotting lay the nascent infighting of Colonial party politics.

Daniel Horsmanden, the presiding Superior Court judge who led the investigation and would later write the only account that survives of the events, was after more than just truth in the proceedings. His own political gain rested upon asserting “not only the authority of the Supreme Court but also its transcendence over party loyalties.” The latter were created in the 1730’s, when James Alexander founded the opposition Country Party in protesting the repressive reign of Governor William Cosby. Cosby’s successor, George Clarke, whose authority was also challenged for a time, later appointed Horsmanden judge, while Alexander also served as an attorney in Horsmanden’s court. Thus, 40 years before the Revolution, partisan politics was born.

Ms. Lepore argues that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and that perhaps the most troubling paradox of the conspiracy trials of 1741 is how the fundamental liberty of the American political system was nurtured into existence by slavery. “Alexander’s political party plotted to depose the governor; the city’s slaves, allegedly, plotted to kill him,” Ms. Lepore observes. “The difference made Alexander’s opposition seem, relative to slave rebellion, harmless, and in so doing made the world safer for democracy.” Troubling as this last phrase has come to sound, there’s a clarity to the author’s insight that opens up the episode to the long view that history can sometimes grant us. Meanwhile, the tragedy lies in the human price paid. Put another way, the liberty gained seems in itself hollow when leading so quickly to court cases argued by posse and confessions obtained at the end of a rope.

Compelling as Ms. Lepore’s thesis may be on the growth of American political liberty, her focus upon it often gets skewed or distracted amid the clutter of her narrative. Too often, she interrupts her argument to provide deep background that, although interesting, makes it hard to keep the sequence of players and events straight. Writing about the fire at Fort George, she stops to tell the history of fire brigades and firefighting equipment in New York. After observing that Horsmanden owned no slaves, she goes on for two pages about the legalities of willing slaves as property and the nature of slave burials. In addition, her conflation of alleged meetings and events before the trials and the unfolding of the cases themselves is at times kaleidoscopic, while even the linkages between 1730’s party politics and the conspiracy come to feel tenuous amid too much forced shuffling back and forth. This, of course, supports the observation that what actually happened is “maddeningly unknowable,” but Ms. Lepore risks making it even more so.

She writes: “That abject bondage contributed to the creation of the world’s first modern democracy, however true and even self-evident, is, finally, so painful a truth as to be nearly unfathomable.” Nearly unfathomable, but not entirely—the urge to comprehend painful truths is one reason why history is written and read. And the fact that racism and human degradation contributed to this country’s good fortune is inarguable. Jill Lepore’s history of a few months of mass hysteria in Colonial New York underscores the fact that our legacy is a troubled one.

A final irony: The human remains excavated in 1991 from the 18th-century Negroes Burial Ground were almost lost in the collapse of the World Trade Center. They were at last reburied in 2003, at the original site on Chambers Street—a Pyrrhic victory for those lost to a history they never had the chance to write.

Peter Filkins teaches writing and literature at Simon’s Rock College of Bard.