This long-unavailable work by one of America’s most eminent and popular writers appears in paperback for the first time.

Drinks Before Dinner, called “witty and provocative” by the New York Times, is E.L. Doctorow’s only play. A tour-de-force of language and ideas concerning the individual’s role in and response to contemporary America, Drinks Before Dinner revolves around a dinner party for the economically privileged.

As Doctorow writes in his introduction, “[This play] deals in general statements about the most common circumstances of our lives, the numbers of us, the cars we drive, the television we watch, the cities we live in, our contraception and our armaments, and our underlying sense of the apocalypse…”

For the past two decades, E. L. Doctorow has been counted among the country’s best-regarded men of letters. His novels include The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks. He has also published a volume selected essays, Jack London, Hemmingway, and the Constitution. His writings have garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the William Dean Howells medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.