Ragtime
by E. L. Doctorow
Today was the birthday of E. L. Doctorow, who would have been 94 today. To mark the occasion, consider reading his brilliant novel Ragtime, first published 50 years ago in July 1975.
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was named after Edgar Allan Poe. After serving with the US army in West Germany he became an editor with New American Library and the Dial Press, working with James Baldwin, Norman Mailer and Ayn Rand among many others. He left in 1969 to pursue his own writing career and produced twelve novels, three volumes of short stories and a play. In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal and when Doctorow died in 2015 President Barack Obama called him ‘one of America’s greatest novelists’.
Ragtime is a sweeping portrait of early 20th-century America, incorporating historical figures such as Theodore Dreiser, Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, Harry Houdini, Carl Jung, J. P. Morgan and Emiliano Zapata, as well as the former chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, who inspired a mad millionaire to murder the architect Stanford White. Around these people and events, Doctorow orchestrates three fictional families, one black, one Jewish and one white, in a narrative that spans dire poverty and fabulous wealth. ‘An extraordinary fictional tapestry,’ said the New Republic, ‘completely absorbing because once in, there is no possible way out except through the last page.’
Ragtime won a National Book Critics Circle Award and Miloš Forman directed a      film adaptation in 1981, the last film to star James Cagney and one of the first to feature performances by Jeff Daniels and Samuel L. Jackson. The poster is inspired by Charles Dana Gibson’s 1901 portrait of Evelyn Nesbitt, titled The Eternal Question, in which Nesbitt’s hair resembles a question mark. In the film, Nesbitt is played by Elizabeth McGovern.
In 1998, the Broadway musical adaptation of Ragtime – with music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and a book by Terrence McNally – won four Tony Awards. It has been revived several times around the world. You can listen to the soundtrack on Spotify here.
Buy a copy of Ragtime through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US) and Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!
Also, I do apologise for including the wrong link in my last email about Leo Tolstoy. I’ve updated the version online, but for those who received it as an email, I meant to link to this page, which has all the details of our forthcoming Anna Karenina read-along. Apologies for any confusion.
And finally, I send out classics recommendations like this every Monday – and round-up emails some Wednesdays. If you’d prefer not to receive these emails – but you would like to receive our read-along messages – follow this link to your settings and under Notifications slide the toggle next to ‘Read the Classics with Henry Eliot’. A grey toggle means you will not receive emails.
Really interesting and love this line …..
New Republic, ‘completely absorbing because once in, there is no possible way out except through the last page.’
I bought a copy of this in 1975 and it sat unread on my shelves for years. Now long gone but I suspect it must have been well-promoted at the time for me to have bought it on student nurse’s pay.