Ragtime: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)
by By Doctorow, E. L.
Category: Fiction , Historical , General

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timePublished 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.