In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and compassionately render the lives of those who marched.

The author of Ragtime, City of God, and The Book of Daniel has given us a magisterial work with an enormous cast of unforgettable characters–white and black, men, women, and children, unionists and rebels, generals and privates, freed slaves and slave owners. At the center is General Sherman himself; a beautiful freed slave girl named Pearl; a Union regimental surgeon, Colonel Sartorius; Emily Thompson, the dispossessed daughter of a Southern judge; and Arly and Will, two misfit soldiers.

Almost hypnotic in its narrative drive, The March stunningly renders the countless lives swept up in the violence of a country at war with itself. The great march in E. L. Doctorow’s hands becomes something more–a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.

E.L.多剋托羅（1931—），當代美國著名作傢，生於紐約猶太人傢庭，在哥倫比亞大學攻讀碩士學位時參軍。退伍後相繼擔任哥倫比亞影片公司審稿人、新美國文庫齣版社編輯、日晷齣版社總編輯，一九六九年起專事寫作。

多剋托羅自一九六一年發錶小說《歡迎來到艱難時代》至今筆耕不輟。主要作品還包括《上帝之城》、《歡迎來到艱難時代》、《丹尼爾之書》、《雷格泰姆音樂》、《盧恩湖》、《詩人的生活》、《世界博覽會》、《比利·巴思蓋特》和《噴水裝置》等。作品已經被翻譯成三十多種文字。

多剋托羅曾獲得美國國傢圖書奬，分彆兩度獲得國傢書評人協會小說奬、美國筆會/福剋納小說奬，伊迪絲·沃頓小說奬，美國藝術與人文學院威廉·迪恩·豪斯奬，以及由美國總統頒發的國傢人文奬章。

多剋托羅現居於紐約。