Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [0]
“Doctorow’s tapestry of an America rapidly losing its innocence is brilliant.”
—People
“One of the best ten books of the decade!”
—Time
“Fascinating … resonant … brilliant … Go and enjoy.”
—The Boston Globe
“An extraordinary deft, lyrical, rich novel that catches the spirit of this country … in a fluid musical way that is as original as it is satisfying.”
—The New Yorker
“Simply splendid … a bag of riches … enormous fun to read.”
—The Village Voice
“Ingeniously structured … beautiful to listen to … and likely to be read a second time more.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A unique and beautiful work of art about American destiny, built of fact and logical fantasy, governed by music heard and sensed, responsive to cinema, shaken by a continental pulse … written exquisitely … Doctorow has added a grace to our history.”
—Saturday Review
“As exhilarating as a deep breath of oxygen … highly original.”
—Newsweek
ALSO BY E. L. DOCTOROW
Welcome to Hard Times
Big as Life
The Book of Daniel
Drinks Before Dinner (play)
Loon Lake
Lives of the Poets
World’s Fair
Billy Bathgate
Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (essays)
The Waterworks
City of God
Sweet Land Stories
The March
Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006
The author thanks the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
and the Creative Artists Program Service
for fellowships awarded during the period in
which this novel was written.
Respectfully dedicated to
Rose Doctorow Buck
Do not play this piece fast
It is never right to play Ragtime fast….
—SCOTT JOPLIN
I
1
In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows. The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and fair. The best part of Father’s income was derived from the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks. Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900’s. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another. That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants. On Sunday afternoon, after dinner, Father and Mother went upstairs and closed the bedroom door. Grandfather fell asleep on the divan in the parlor. The Little Boy in the sailor blouse sat on the screened porch and waved away the flies. Down at the bottom of the hill Mother’s Younger Brother boarded the streetcar and rode to the end of the line. He was a lonely, withdrawn young man with blond moustaches, and was thought to be having difficulty finding himself. The end of the line was an empty field of tall marsh grasses. The air was salt. Mother’s Younger Brother in his white linen suit and boater rolled his trousers and walked barefoot in the salt marshes. Sea birds started and flew up. This was the time in our history when Winslow Homer was doing his painting. A certain light was still available along the Eastern seaboard. Homer painted the light. It gave the sea a heavy dull menace and shone coldly on the rocks and shoals of the New England coast. There were unexplained shipwrecks and brave towline rescues. Odd things went on in lighthouses and in shacks nestled in the wild beach plum. Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable. Runaway women died in the rigors