HOMER AND LANGLEY BY E.L. DOCTOROW

Homer and Langley are brothers, the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness or perhaps greatness by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think that they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers, as research for Langley's proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet, the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers, wars, political movements, technological advances, and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians......and their housebound lives are fraught with peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

The book is brilliantly conceived, and gorgeously written, this is a wonderful rendering of the lives of the Collyer brothers.