Ragtime
“A unique and beautiful work of art about American destiny…Doctorow has added a grace to our history.”
Saturday Review
A Publishers Weekly Best Audiobook of 2016
One of the Modern Library's 100 Best English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century
A #1 New York Times Bestseller
One of Time Magazine's Best 100 English-Language Novels from 1923–2005
Nominated for the 1975 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, 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, disappears. 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.
Praise