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Billy Bathgate is a 1989 novel by author E. L. Doctorow that won the 1989 National Book Critics...

Billy Bathgate is a 1989 novel by author E. L. Doctorow that won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle award for fiction for 1990 and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was the runner up for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize . The story is told in the first person by Billy "Bathgate" Behan, a fifteen-year-old boy who first becomes the gofer and then surrogate son of mobster Dutch Schultz. The book explores the question of self determination versus fate, attempts to explore and establish the theory postulating the futility of sex without love, moral relativism, and the romanticization of the Mafia in American pop culture. A 1991 film based on the novel starred Loren Dean as Billy, Dustin Hoffman as Schultz, Steven Hill as Otto Berman, Nicole Kidman as Drew, and Bruce Willis as Bo. The title character is a poor and fatherless teenager growing up in The Bronx. Billy and his friends are in awe of the flashy mobsters in the neighborhood. Dutch Schultz and Otto Berman, based on the real-life mobsters, hire Billy as a gofer and become mentors to him. The gangsters take Billy up to their upstate hideaway, where they are awaiting a trial. Schultz becomes a community leader and converts to