Ragtime Study Guide

E. L. Doctorow was born in 1931 in the Bronx to parents who were both second-generation Jewish immigrants from Russia. His mother was a pianist and his father sold music. Doctorow grew up in a family of avid readers, and he was drawn to writing early in life, becoming a contributing member of his science-focused high school’s small literary student paper. He attended Kenyon College in Ohio and completed one year of graduate studies in literature at Columbia University in New York before being drafted into military service during the Korean War. After he returned to the United States, he worked for many years as a book editor. He published his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, in 1960. Doctorow’s body of work—which includes 12 novels, three short story collections, and miscellaneous essays, stage plays, and screenplays—frequently involves reimagining and appropriating historical events and figures to examine themes of American life. Several of his books have been turned into movies. He had three children with his wife. Doctorow continued writing and publishing up until his death in 2015 from complications of lung cancer.

Generally speaking, Ragtime is set against the backdrop of the Progressive Era (1901-1920). And while it includes a great number of specific events from this period, readers should be aware that it plays around with the timing and details of many of them. The Progressive Era was a period of massive political and social reforms in the United States focused on, among other things, quelling political corruption; improving the lives of the poor and working classes; updating and modernizing sanitation in cities; decreasing child labor; and expanding women’s rights. It was also a time of disruption as industry shifted toward mechanization and automation—which made things like Model Ts increasingly available to the middle class, but also put many skilled workers out of work. This contributed to increasing unionization efforts during the period. The International Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in 1905 and it subsequently led a series of important labor strikes. One of these was the 1912 Lawrence Textile Mill Strike, in which the state militia, at the behest of the mill owners really did severely beat several hundred children and parents at the train station. The book features Emma Goldman and some of her compatriots, who were all committed anarchists. As a political philosophy, anarchism seeks to abolish all forms of hierarchy (governments, class systems, gender hierarchies). While organizing and education were important features of anarchists’ work, attention-grabbing acts of violence (like the 1901 assassination of American President McKinley) contributed to a sense that anarchism was a violent ideology, especially as revolutionary movements generally rose to prominence in the early 20th century. These included the rise of socialism in Europe and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), which sought to topple a brutal dictatorship and establish democracy in the country.

In Ragtime, Grandfather tells Little Boy stories drawn from the Metamorphoses, an epic poem composed by Roman poet Ovid early in the 1st century CE. The Metamorphoses tells hundreds of stories of transformation and change and explores themes including violence, justice, and gender. An accessible and thoughtful translation of this work was published in 2023 by Stephanie McCarter. Another more recent novel that shares Ragtime’s interest in history, the immigrant experience, and even Ovid is Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2002 Middlesex, which follows the Greek Stephanides family from its immigration in the 1920s through the late 20th century. But Ragtime’s themes and narrative style also echo late 19th- and early 20th-century American urban novels, works like Stephen Crane’s 1893 Maggie, Girl of the Streets and Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 Sister Carrie. These books featured poor and working-class individuals in otherwise prosperous cities like New York while examining themes of class, suffering, gender and sexuality, and the American Dream. Moreover, Ragtime directly adapts the circumstances surrounding Coalhouse Walker Jr.’s feud with Willie Conklin from an 1810 novella by German author Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas, which is in turn based on a historical incident from the 17th century. Finally, readers interested in the life of Evelyn Nesbit, or the murder of Stanford White and Harry Thaw’s subsequent trial, can find a nonfiction account in Paula Uruburu’s 2008 American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the ‘It’ Girl, and the Crime of the Century.