Characters
- Mr McIlvaine: first-person narrator
- Martin Pemberton: Freelance journalist, who writes scathing reviews and is at odds with his father
- Augustus Pemberton: gained wealth from the slave trade and the production of low grade war goods during the American Civil War
- Harry Wheelwright: the only friend of Martin Pemberton. McIlvaine doesn't like him
- Emily Tisdale: fiancée and schoolfriend of Martin
- Revd. Charles Grimshaw: in the circle of Augustus Pemberton
- Edmund Donne: One of the few policemen in New York who is not corrupt.
- Dr. Sartorius: Doctor with a Faust-like thirst for knowledge . He worked in military hospitals during the Civil War. In this role he appears in E.L. Doctorow's later novel, The March. McIlvaine gives the origin of his name, the Latin word for dressmaker.
Read more about this topic: The Waterworks
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that’s basically a conservative view of life.”
—Jane Smiley (b. 1949)