Homer & Langley

E. L. Doctorow’s novel Homer & Langley is based on the true story of two reclusive brothers, the Collyers, living in Manhattan in the middle of the twentieth century. Doctorow takes the story of the brothers, who were found dead in their 5th Avenue apartment among mountains of newspapers and debris, and weaves in the history of the early twentieth century, including war, political and social change, and advancements in technology.

As the book opens, Homer, the blind Collyer brother, introduces himself. He narrates the story, which follows the boys' childhood until their eventual death together, in their crowded flat on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Doctorow begins the novel with a creepy scene in which Homer describes his blindness not as a sudden loss, but as the gradual darkening of his world. He looks out from his balcony over the city, and parts of the distant skyline disappear, and then closer buildings, and finally Central Park below, including the small bodies of ice skaters slipping back and forth. Doctorow relates Homer's blindness to the blindness and prophecy of the famous Greek poet Homer, and from that day forward, Homer believes he has the ability to see the future.

Homer begins to tell the story of the strange, and often deeply tragic lives of the Collyer brothers. A child in the Gilded Age, he watched as his parents left him and his brother behind on the dock with a nanny. They were wealthy and taking their annual vacation to Europe. The boys stayed behind, cared for by loving family in a mansion in Manhattan.



The boys grow up – Homer begins to play the piano and sits at home, mostly, while his brother is shipped off to fight in World War I. When Langley returns, he is sick from the war – he was gassed, and might have developed neurasthenia, a disease of the brain that can lead to manic behavior and a lack of control over desires and senses. In 1918, just after Langley returns, Homer and Langley's parents die of Spanish Influenza, and the boys inherit the mansion and the entire family fortune. This is when the true eccentricities of the brothers begin to shine: Langley begins hoarding, collecting every object, particularly newspapers. Langley has a desire to combine every newspaper into an eternal, dateless newspaper – a newspaper that would tell the future, giving the state of every aspect of the world.

During their younger years, as Langley continues his hoarding, the brothers socialize a bit. They go to speakeasies in the 1920s and meet up with gangsters. They throw “tea dances” during the Great Depression, one of which is raided by the police. Homer, who is blind and does not see the officers, is knocked out cold by a baton before Langley can explain the situation. The brothers experience World War II through the eyes of their Japanese servants, who are sent to internment camps. Later, they watch the moon landing and invite hippies from a Vietnam War protest into their home. Eventually, Langley becomes so manic and wild that he builds a Model T in their living room, the house becomes a disaster of pillars of newspaper and junk, and the brothers don't have heat, electricity, or water because they refuse to pay the bills.

This final, chaotic moment brings the story to its end, as the brothers spend their last years in isolation; Homer, blind and eventually also deaf, forced to trust his increasingly manic brother, the only guide he has ever known. Rather than focus on the moment of their death, as so many have, Doctorow focuses more on how the brothers lived – what inspired them, why they did what they did, and who they were to each other.



E. L. Doctorow was a best-selling novelist known for his works of historical fiction. His most prominent works include Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, World's Fair, Homer & Langley, and others. Doctorow was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award three times over and received a Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy for Arts and Letters. He also won a Library of Congress Prize and multiple PEN Awards. An esteemed professor of English, he died in 2015 in his home city of New York.