Ragtime

by E. L. Doctorow
Category: "Fiction - Historical"
Pages:369
Year of Publication:1975
Date Read:02/17/1997
Notes:Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disap-
pears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
My Rating: 5

Reviews for Ragtime

Review - Ragtime

A choppy, hectic, disjointed hodgepodge of events and people that were only loosely connected but were supposed to be representative of the times. It was a quick read, but ultimately just silly.
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