E. L. Doctorow

An in-depth investigation into the private world of the American writer J. D. Salinger (1919-2010), who lived most of his life behind the impenetrable wall of a self-imposed seclusion: how his dramatic experiences during World War II influenced his life and work, his relationships with very young women, his obsessive writing methods, his many literary secrets.

Buffalo Bill plans to put on his own Wild West sideshow, and Chief Sitting Bull has agreed to appear in it. However, Sitting Bull has his own hidden agenda, involving the President and General Custer.

A documentary profile of director/choreographer Bob Fosse. Includes clips from his films and television specials as well as interviews with Fosse, remembrances from his friends, and commentary by Gwen Verdon. A Dance in America presentation, broadcast as part of Great Performances.

An intellectual match between two dramatically different artists, one permanently unsure and frustrated and questioning everything, the other an astonishing storyteller perfectly at peace, unacquainted with introspection and reliant on intuition.

A documentary exploring the creation of the new musical Ragtime, based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow.

For more than a century, New York’s Greenwich Village was home, playground, and inspiration to many of America’s leading writers and artists—Henry James, Edith Wharton, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan, among many others. How these writers used and were shaped by the Village is the subject of this lively history, which includes readings and commentary by today’s Village authors E. L. Doctorow, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, and Louis Auchincloss.

The fictionalized story of Daniel, the son of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, who were executed as Soviet spies in the 1950s. As a graduate student in New York in the 1960s, Daniel is involved in the antiwar protest movement and contrasts his experiences to the memory of his parents and his belief that they were wrongfully convicted.