“It was a terrible moment in my writing life,” wrote E L Doctorow about his breakthrough novel. “I literally threw the pages across the room. And then I sat down at the typewriter… and I found that what I was typing was the first page of The Book of Daniel.”

The Book of Daniel (1971), followed by Ragtime (1975), established Doctorow as one of America’s leading writers. Both books told dramatic stories with fascinating characters. Both were made into films with big stars and major directors.

More important, Doctorow discovered his voice as a writer, learning that he needed to create a character to tell the story. He also discovered his subject: the history of modern America.

Doctorow, who died this week at the age of 84 after a battle with lung cancer, was the Jewish American Dickens — born to a humble background, at home in the past and present, passionate about social justice. Like Dickens, he was prolific.

Over half-a-century he wrote a dozen novels, three volumes of short fiction and several books of essays and commentary on literature and politics.

His characters were gangsters, soldiers and immigrants. Paying tribute, President Barack Obama said Doctorow was “one of America’s greatest novelists. His books taught me much.”

New York in the 1930s was the world Doctorow knew best. Born in 1931, he grew up in the Bronx, the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Russia. “My grandfather,” Doctorow told an interviewer, “was of the immigrant generation that came over in the 1880s.

He was a great reader, a printer by trade and something of an intellectual, and he too had a considerable library. Not only books in English but Russian books and books in Yiddish. It was in his house that I first heard the name Tolstoy.”

Doctorow’s father, David, sold musical instruments in a store in midtown Manhattan. Edgar Lawrence (named after Edgar Allan Poe) was educated at Bronx High School of Science and Kenyon College.

The next 15 years saw him in the army in Germany, a year studying theatre at Columbia, reading scripts for Columbia Pictures and then a decade in publishing in New York.

Then, in 1969, Doctorow, married and with three children, gave up his career to write.

The Book of Daniel was published two years later. This told the story of the Rosenbergs, executed for treason in 1953, through the eyes of their son, Daniel.

Ragtime (1975), perhaps his best-known novel, is set in early 20th century New York and moves between three families — a white upper-middle class family, a Jewish immigrant family and an African-American couple — and various famous historical figures, including Houdini, Emma Goldman and Freud.

History and fiction are mixed together, set against the big stories of pre-First-World-War America: the beginning of the movies, the beginnings of the modern labour movement and women’s rights. Ragtime was a huge hit and launched Doctorow’s career.

His two big novels of the ’80s were World’s Fair and Billy Bathgate. World’s Fair (1985), focuses on a young boy growing up in the Bronx in the ’30s. Billy Bathgate (1989) is also about a youth from the Bronx in the ’30s, who gets involved with the gangster Dutch Schultz (played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1991 film).

It is no coincidence that Doctorow’s literary breakthrough came with finding a Jewish subject, the Rosenbergs. His own background could hardly have been more Jewish.

Many of his most enduring characters, from the Rosenbergs, Houdini and the Jewish immigrant Tateh in Ragtime to the narrator of his best short story, The Writer in the Family, are Jews.