Homer & Langley

by E. L. Doctorow

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Homer Collyer loses his sight while still young, and his brother Langley returns from the First World War with lungs damaged by mustard gas and a deep mistrust of modern society. After their parents die during the 1918 influenza epidemic, the brothers inherit a Fifth Avenue house and gradually withdraw from the city beyond it, depending increasingly on one another as servants, friends and lovers disappear.

Doctorow deliberately extends the lives of the historical Collyer brothers so that wars, Prohibition, the Depression, gangsters, jazz, government pressure and 1960s counterculture pass through their home. Langley’s newspaper collecting becomes compulsive hoarding, and the mansion turns into a barricaded labyrinth. Homer’s account presents their isolation as both an eccentric defence of independence and a slow imprisonment.