To open this book is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. 

Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes a good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protege to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow’s trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow’s boldest and most beloved bestsellers.

"In composing Billy Bathgate out of a boy's divided loyalties, E. L. Doctorow has restored to the memory of American culture the era of the Great Depression it has tried to forget. In recovering the cultural legacy of the Depression era, Doctorow has produced a book that promises to remain as permanent an addition to its culture as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, its cultural predecessor."  -  Donald E. Pease, America Magazine

E. L. Doctorow's works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honours are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize honouring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN Saul Bellow Award.