'Novelists might be dealing only with imaginary events whereas historians are dealing with real ones, but the process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into a comprehensible totality capable of serving as the object of a representation is a poetic process.' (White1978:125) In his piece The Fictions of Factual Representation, from which this quote is taken, White argues that there is in fact little difference between the structure of history writing and the novel, that they are both essentially narrative in form. E.L Doctorow's novel, The Book of Daniel, makes the distinction between history and fiction even more difficult to define. Doctorow's fictional strategies in this novel demonstrate a great deal about late modernist/early postmodernist attitudes to history. I will illustrate this through a thorough examination of this work.
             The Book of Daniel is a fictional account of the Rosenberg case which took place in the 1950's in America. My use of the word fictional here becomes problematic though when the actual case and the novel are examined in relation to each other, as the lines between fact and fiction become increasingly blurred, to the point where the reader can no longer distinguish between the two. On the first page of the novel the implied author, Daniel places us in the library at Columbia University, giving an accurate account of what the library actually looks like. On page 16 he talks about his professor, Professor Sukenick, a real professor at this institute at the time. But beyond this real setting, much of what he deals with is either based closely on fact or is plainly fact. Paul Isaacson studied engineering at City College New York, as did Julius Rosenberg, although Julius actually completed his degree. Paul Isaacson owned a small radio repair shop and Julius Rosenberg worked for the Emerson Radio Corporation for a while. Rochelle Isaacson was always more politically ...