Reading Selection - March 2004

Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow

E.L. DOCTOROW’S list of great American novels include Ragtime, City of God, Billy Bathgate, World’s Fair and numerous others. A recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the National Book Award, the Edith Wharton Citation For Fiction, and the William Dean Howells medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Doctorow has taken his place among America’s best authors. A graduate of Kenyon College and Columbia University, Doctorow lives in New York, where he has taught Creative Writing for New York University. E.L. Doctorow was named after Edgar Allan Poe.

RAGTIME remains E.L. Doctorow’s most controversial work even as it holds a place in America’s imagination. Published in 1975 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ragtime plunges the reader into turn-of-the-century New York, and captivates with its sense of time and place. Blurring the lines of fantasy and historical fact, Doctorow’s work features Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud and Emiliano Zapata, whose lives intersect with those of his own imagined family and others, including a ragtime musician from Harlem whose passion for principle and justice leads him to revolutionary violence. The tapestry of stories eventually interwoven reminds us that we are all connected to one another.

George Stade
"...(It) is in this excellent novel, whose silhouettes and rags not only make fiction out of history but also reveal the fictions out of which history is made. It incorporates the fictions and realities of the era of ragtime while it rags our fictions about it. It is an anti-nostalgic novel that incorporates our nostalgia about its subject. It is cool, hard, controlled, utterly unsentimental, an art of sharp outlines and clipped phrases. yet it implies all we could ask for in the way of texture, mood, character and despair." Books of the Century, The New York Times, July, 1975

Movie Adaptation

In 1981, Ragtime was adapted into a movie, directed by Milos Forman. The film was nominated for Academy Awards for best screenplay adaptation, supporting actor, supporting actress, art direction/set direction, cinematography, costume design, music, and song.

Find out more about the movie at:

Review:

Other Titles by E.L. Doctorow Include:

Welcome to Hard Times, 1960
The Book of Daniel, 1971
Ragtime, 1975
Drinks Before Dinner: A Play, 1978
Loon Lake, 1980
Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella, 1984
World’s Fair, 1985
Billy Bathgate, 1989
Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992, 1993
The Waterworks, 1994
City of God, 2000