Annotation
By: Liz Lemmon
Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow is set in America during the early 1900s. It tells the story of three interesting and remarkable families whose lives become intricately woven together by circumstance. Individually, each family must learn lessons about each other and the American way of life. Together, they rely on each for guidance and support during the major social changes occurring. Ragtime is a story told from the perspective of families struggling to find where they fit in, meeting historical figures and witnessing major events of America in the time of ragtime.
Tateh and his daughter live a poverty-stricken life in New York. As an immigrant, there isn’t much work offered to Tateh. He realizes that a life of poverty isn’t right for his little girl and they leave their grotesque life in the Lower East Side forever.
Father, Mother and the little boy are an upper class family from New York. Their life suddenly changes when a brown baby is found outside in their garden. Feeling compassionate, Mother decides to care for the baby and the baby’s mom, Sarah. The brown baby’s father, Coalhouse Walker II, begins courting Sarah at Mother and Father’s homestead, against Father’s negative feelings.
Walker is not the average African-American. Displaying fine clothing, money, and a brand new automobile, he contradicts the stereotypes of African-Americans everywhere. Due to his success however, Walker’s pride begins to take over his gentlemanly way of life. Plagued by Walker’s new life of crime, Mother and Father are forced to flee the craziness of New York to Atlantic City with Walker’s son in tow.
Summary
By: Amy Ankenbrandt
(Spoiler alert!)
E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime weaves together many stories, combining both fictional and historical characters. The stories take place between 1902 and 1914, mainly in the New York area. Doctorow opens the novel with Mother, Father, their son (the little boy), and Mother’s Younger Brother in New Rochelle, New York. Harry Houdini crashes his car in front of their home and is invited in for a visit. Father reveals that he will be leaving for an expedition with Robert Peary to the North Pole. From here, we also learn about the famous chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, with whom Younger Brother is infatuated though he has never met her. Nesbit’s husband, Harry K. Thaw, is in jail, charged with murdering her former lover, the architect Stanford White. While her husband is locked up, Evelyn begins visiting the Lower East side, where she slowly befriends Tateh, a Jewish immigrant who works as a silhouette artist on the street, and his daughter, Sha. Emma Goldman, a revolutionary activist and anarchist, is also introduced when Evelyn and Tateh, who is a socialist, attend a meeting where she is speaking, and Goldman and Nesbit end up in a room together following a police raid. At this point, Mother’s Younger Brother meets Nesbit and the two enter into an affair. Additionally, Mother unearths a baby who has been buried in the ground, and decides to take the baby and the baby’s mother, Sarah, a washwoman who had been working in the area, into her home. Mother and her family are European American, and Sarah and her baby are African American. J. P. Morgan, the extremely wealthy businessman, and Henry Ford, of the Ford Motor Company, are also introduced. Morgan wants Ford to travel with him to Egypt, but Ford declines.
As the novel progresses, all of these plot lines are built upon. Father leaves on his expedition with Robert Peary, Matthew Henson and their crew, and he returns home much later. Houdini’s many tricks and feats are described. Houdini reacts strongly to the death of his mother, to whom he was very attached. Nesbit leaves Mother’s Younger Brother, causing him considerable distress; in response, he throws himself into his work as an expert in explosives. Tateh and Sha travel to Massachusetts where he works for a while in a textile mill until the workers strike. Then they travel to Philadelphia where happens to find a novelty story that agrees to publish and buy some of his moving picture books. At Father and Mother’s home, Coalhouse Walker, a ragtime pianist and the father of Sarah’s baby, shows up at the door and asks to see Sarah; Sarah turns him down. He repeats this visit weekly. Eventually he is invited in for tea by the family, and after some time Sarah consents to see him. He proposes marriage and she accepts. Coalhouse is driving his Model-T to visit his fiancée when a group of volunteer firemen, led by fire chief William Conklin, stops him, blocking the road all around him, and demands a $25 toll. Coalhouse leaves his car to find a police officer and returns to find his car vandalized. This dispute begins a quest for vengeance that results indirectly in the death of Sarah. All of Coalhouses attempts for legal recourse are met with inaction, so he decides to work around the law. Coalhouse and his followers shoot several of Conklin’s firemen and set the fire station ablaze. Mother’s Younger Brother, made-up in blackface, is one of his followers. Coalhouse demands to have his car returned in the condition it was in before the firemen stopped him, as well as to have Conklin delivered to him. When this does not happen, he and his followers attack another fire station.
After the media discovers Mother and Father’s connection to Coalhouse Walker, they decide to stay in a hotel in Atlantic City, where they meet Tateh and Sha, though Tateh introduces himself as a Baron, which he is not. Tateh has become successful as a filmmaker. Sha and the little boy become good friends.
Coalhouse and his followers invade J. P. Morgan’s library, full of extremely valuable art and artifacts, and essentially hold the property hostage while Morgan is off travelling. This situation creates a large reaction from the city, as many explosives are involved. Father is sent for to try to help, at which point he discovers Mother’s Younger Brother is one of Coalhouse’s men. Even Booker T. Washington is brought in to try to diffuse the situation. Eventually, the District Attorney, Charles Whitman, agrees to bring in the Model-T and Conklin; Conklin is put to work repairing the car. His terms met, Coalhouse arranges for his followers to escape in his car and he surrenders himself. He is shot by the officers, presumably after purposefully making a move to bring such a response. Mother’s Younger Brother joins the Zapatistas in Mexico and dies shortly after. Morgan dies after his trip to Egypt. Father dies on the Lusitania while accompanying some of the explosives he helped to design, following the notes left by Mother’s Younger Brother. A year after Father’s death, Mother marries Tateh. Houdini continues to awe audiences, Goldman is forced out of the country, Nesbit’s fame dissipates, and Thaw is released from prison.
Biography of E.L. Doctorow
By: Liz Lemmon
Named after Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born on January 6th, 1931, in New York City. At the age of 9, Doctorow decided that he wanted to be a writer. A lot of his influence came from his parents, who loved to read and kept a wide library of literature in their home always. Like so many famous novelists before him, Doctorow attended the Bronx High School of Science. It was here that he had his first work published entitled “The Beetle,” in the school’s newspaper, Dynamo. Doctorow attended Kenyon College in Ohio directly out of high school, graduating with honors in 1952. Soon after, Doctorow enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University. However, that same year, Doctorow was drafted into the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany until 1955. Doctorow met and married Helen Setzer there. They had three children together.
Upon returning to the states with his new family, Doctorow decided to pursue a career in publishing. Doctorow became the senior editor for the New York American Library in 1959, and stayed in that position until 1964. He then became editor in chief for the New York Dial Press until 1969. Since leaving his position as editor in chief, Doctorow has devoted nearly all of his time to both writing and teaching. Over the years he has taught at such renowned colleges as Yale University, Princeton University, and New York University. At the latter university, Doctorow was awarded the Glucksman Chair of American Letters, a prestigious award given to those historical writers of contemporary American English.
Doctorow’s work depicts various time periods and social movements in American history. He has over ten novels published and his writings have been published in more than 30 languages across the world. One of his most famous novels, Ragtime, has sold over 1 million copies. Ragtime was named one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the editorial board of the Modern Library and was adapted into a successful Broadway musical in 1998. Doctorow is loved by readers for the beauty of his prose and for bringing events, people, and places of the American past alive in new and interesting ways.
Sources
"American Conversation with E.L. Doctorow." National Archives and Records Administration. 25 September 2008. Web. 29 November 2010.
"E.L. Doctorow Biography." BookBrowse. Updated 12 November 2005. Web. 28 November 2010.
Book Review
By: Liz Lemmon
Even before the Broadway musical and the film, Ragtime was E.L. Doctorow's best known work, a celebrated novel that combines the syncopation of ragtime and the literary sensibilities of a writer intrigued by history as literary device. Set primarily in Westchester County's New Rochelle but also in New York City and, briefly, Massachusetts, the novel follows the stories of real and fictional characters as they move from innocence to disillusionment, from peace time to the beginnings of racial conflict and World War I.
Because the novel contains so many stories, some as short as a few pages (in the case of Freud) and some woven throughout the entire novel, describing the plot of the book is a challenge. The author primarily follows the lives of a New Rochelle family (Father, Mother, Younger Brother, and the Little Boy) as they navigate changing times. Father accompanies Peary on his exploration to the North Pole. Mother takes in a young black woman, Sarah, and her newborn, an impulsive act which leads to the introduction of ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker and his simple demands which escalate into violence. Younger Brother becomes infatuated with the celebrated beauty Evelyn Nesbit, which in turn leads to his association with anarchist Emma Goldman. Harry Houdini's car breaks down in front of their house, and the novel enters his story as well. The family acts as a touchstone for the disparate stories of a generation. Meanwhile, the story of a counterpart family - Mameh, Tateh, and the Little Girl - unfolds in the ghetto, where the Jewish immigrant family struggles for survival. Unbeknownst to both families, their stories are linked by those of the others.
In syncopated prose that dissipates partway through the novel as the short age of ragtime gives way to jazz, Doctorow manages to infuse irony in short, seemingly unrelated sentences: "Everyone wore white in the summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes." Since the novel is about the loss of the naiveté that gives birth to such generalizations, this kind of set-up allows for the numerous tales that shoot off in different directions.
The complicated novel is not demanding to read, although the huge cast of characters and the emphasis on history makes emotional identification with the characters difficult. If readers look at this novel as an Impressionistic look at life at the beginning of the 20th century, they will find more satisfaction than if they regard it as the story of Little Boy's family. The coherence of this novel comes from the brackets of an era and not from a tidy relation among the plots. I highly recommend this influential novel for serious readers and students of literature.
Source: Wesselmann, Debbie Lee. "A Riff on American at the Turn of the 20th Century." Amazon. 2 December 2004. Web. 11 December 2010. <http://www.amazon.com/Ragtime-L-Doctorow/dp/0452279070>
Historical Links
By: Amy Ankenbrandt
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40715F6385D0C738EDDAB0994DF484D81&ref=e_l_doctorow&pagewanted=2
This is a New York Times article written about the author of Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow. He describes the influences on his writing, and demonstrates Doctorow’s clever writing style; and this could be an extremely useful piece of literature when discussing the historical novel aspects of the story. I believe that having students read this article in correlation to the creation of a response to the creativity along with solid facts that must go into a historical novel, could be extremely useful in the classroom.
http://ucblibrary3.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Speeches/index.html
This is a compilation of documented speeches delivered by Emma Goldman. I think that these could be greatly utilized in the classroom if students compared these speeches with those of which she delivers in the novel. There are many educational purposes to this assignment, including but not limited to compare and contrast essays and stylistic aspects of speech vs. written.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/ford.htm
This website gives large descriptions of the assembly line and the development of the Model T in relation to Henry Ford’s life. I think that having students use these two topics as a basis for larger resource projects would be a very useful web-quest, which could be further supplemented by a response detailing the significance of that topic/object specifically in the novel. (I think it is important to note, there are many different topics for which this assignment could be used.)
http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780812978186&view=tg
This is a website created by Random House to provide educators with many different ideas including: vocabulary lists, discussion questions, and project prompts. It also provides backgrounds and explanations placed in an educational context. While this list may not provide a teacher with an exact unit plan, it does provide a teacher with a strong basis to formulate a more specific unit for the classroom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTt7RL0PLbA
This youtube video shows the trailer for the 1981 movie Ragtime based off of the novel. I believe that using this video as an opening to the unit could get students intrigued about what is to come. We could use this as an opportunity for students to brainstorm on possible foreshadowing. Furthermore, the actual movie could be watched as a closer, so students will be able to make comparison between the novel and the film.
Historical links and annotations courtesy of Julia Mihelich
By: Liz Lemmon
Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow is set in America during the early 1900s. It tells the story of three interesting and remarkable families whose lives become intricately woven together by circumstance. Individually, each family must learn lessons about each other and the American way of life. Together, they rely on each for guidance and support during the major social changes occurring. Ragtime is a story told from the perspective of families struggling to find where they fit in, meeting historical figures and witnessing major events of America in the time of ragtime.
Tateh and his daughter live a poverty-stricken life in New York. As an immigrant, there isn’t much work offered to Tateh. He realizes that a life of poverty isn’t right for his little girl and they leave their grotesque life in the Lower East Side forever.
Father, Mother and the little boy are an upper class family from New York. Their life suddenly changes when a brown baby is found outside in their garden. Feeling compassionate, Mother decides to care for the baby and the baby’s mom, Sarah. The brown baby’s father, Coalhouse Walker II, begins courting Sarah at Mother and Father’s homestead, against Father’s negative feelings.
Walker is not the average African-American. Displaying fine clothing, money, and a brand new automobile, he contradicts the stereotypes of African-Americans everywhere. Due to his success however, Walker’s pride begins to take over his gentlemanly way of life. Plagued by Walker’s new life of crime, Mother and Father are forced to flee the craziness of New York to Atlantic City with Walker’s son in tow.
Summary
By: Amy Ankenbrandt
(Spoiler alert!)
E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime weaves together many stories, combining both fictional and historical characters. The stories take place between 1902 and 1914, mainly in the New York area. Doctorow opens the novel with Mother, Father, their son (the little boy), and Mother’s Younger Brother in New Rochelle, New York. Harry Houdini crashes his car in front of their home and is invited in for a visit. Father reveals that he will be leaving for an expedition with Robert Peary to the North Pole. From here, we also learn about the famous chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, with whom Younger Brother is infatuated though he has never met her. Nesbit’s husband, Harry K. Thaw, is in jail, charged with murdering her former lover, the architect Stanford White. While her husband is locked up, Evelyn begins visiting the Lower East side, where she slowly befriends Tateh, a Jewish immigrant who works as a silhouette artist on the street, and his daughter, Sha. Emma Goldman, a revolutionary activist and anarchist, is also introduced when Evelyn and Tateh, who is a socialist, attend a meeting where she is speaking, and Goldman and Nesbit end up in a room together following a police raid. At this point, Mother’s Younger Brother meets Nesbit and the two enter into an affair. Additionally, Mother unearths a baby who has been buried in the ground, and decides to take the baby and the baby’s mother, Sarah, a washwoman who had been working in the area, into her home. Mother and her family are European American, and Sarah and her baby are African American. J. P. Morgan, the extremely wealthy businessman, and Henry Ford, of the Ford Motor Company, are also introduced. Morgan wants Ford to travel with him to Egypt, but Ford declines.
As the novel progresses, all of these plot lines are built upon. Father leaves on his expedition with Robert Peary, Matthew Henson and their crew, and he returns home much later. Houdini’s many tricks and feats are described. Houdini reacts strongly to the death of his mother, to whom he was very attached. Nesbit leaves Mother’s Younger Brother, causing him considerable distress; in response, he throws himself into his work as an expert in explosives. Tateh and Sha travel to Massachusetts where he works for a while in a textile mill until the workers strike. Then they travel to Philadelphia where happens to find a novelty story that agrees to publish and buy some of his moving picture books. At Father and Mother’s home, Coalhouse Walker, a ragtime pianist and the father of Sarah’s baby, shows up at the door and asks to see Sarah; Sarah turns him down. He repeats this visit weekly. Eventually he is invited in for tea by the family, and after some time Sarah consents to see him. He proposes marriage and she accepts. Coalhouse is driving his Model-T to visit his fiancée when a group of volunteer firemen, led by fire chief William Conklin, stops him, blocking the road all around him, and demands a $25 toll. Coalhouse leaves his car to find a police officer and returns to find his car vandalized. This dispute begins a quest for vengeance that results indirectly in the death of Sarah. All of Coalhouses attempts for legal recourse are met with inaction, so he decides to work around the law. Coalhouse and his followers shoot several of Conklin’s firemen and set the fire station ablaze. Mother’s Younger Brother, made-up in blackface, is one of his followers. Coalhouse demands to have his car returned in the condition it was in before the firemen stopped him, as well as to have Conklin delivered to him. When this does not happen, he and his followers attack another fire station.
After the media discovers Mother and Father’s connection to Coalhouse Walker, they decide to stay in a hotel in Atlantic City, where they meet Tateh and Sha, though Tateh introduces himself as a Baron, which he is not. Tateh has become successful as a filmmaker. Sha and the little boy become good friends.
Coalhouse and his followers invade J. P. Morgan’s library, full of extremely valuable art and artifacts, and essentially hold the property hostage while Morgan is off travelling. This situation creates a large reaction from the city, as many explosives are involved. Father is sent for to try to help, at which point he discovers Mother’s Younger Brother is one of Coalhouse’s men. Even Booker T. Washington is brought in to try to diffuse the situation. Eventually, the District Attorney, Charles Whitman, agrees to bring in the Model-T and Conklin; Conklin is put to work repairing the car. His terms met, Coalhouse arranges for his followers to escape in his car and he surrenders himself. He is shot by the officers, presumably after purposefully making a move to bring such a response. Mother’s Younger Brother joins the Zapatistas in Mexico and dies shortly after. Morgan dies after his trip to Egypt. Father dies on the Lusitania while accompanying some of the explosives he helped to design, following the notes left by Mother’s Younger Brother. A year after Father’s death, Mother marries Tateh. Houdini continues to awe audiences, Goldman is forced out of the country, Nesbit’s fame dissipates, and Thaw is released from prison.
Biography of E.L. Doctorow
By: Liz Lemmon
Named after Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born on January 6th, 1931, in New York City. At the age of 9, Doctorow decided that he wanted to be a writer. A lot of his influence came from his parents, who loved to read and kept a wide library of literature in their home always. Like so many famous novelists before him, Doctorow attended the Bronx High School of Science. It was here that he had his first work published entitled “The Beetle,” in the school’s newspaper, Dynamo. Doctorow attended Kenyon College in Ohio directly out of high school, graduating with honors in 1952. Soon after, Doctorow enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University. However, that same year, Doctorow was drafted into the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany until 1955. Doctorow met and married Helen Setzer there. They had three children together.
Upon returning to the states with his new family, Doctorow decided to pursue a career in publishing. Doctorow became the senior editor for the New York American Library in 1959, and stayed in that position until 1964. He then became editor in chief for the New York Dial Press until 1969. Since leaving his position as editor in chief, Doctorow has devoted nearly all of his time to both writing and teaching. Over the years he has taught at such renowned colleges as Yale University, Princeton University, and New York University. At the latter university, Doctorow was awarded the Glucksman Chair of American Letters, a prestigious award given to those historical writers of contemporary American English.
Doctorow’s work depicts various time periods and social movements in American history. He has over ten novels published and his writings have been published in more than 30 languages across the world. One of his most famous novels, Ragtime, has sold over 1 million copies. Ragtime was named one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the editorial board of the Modern Library and was adapted into a successful Broadway musical in 1998. Doctorow is loved by readers for the beauty of his prose and for bringing events, people, and places of the American past alive in new and interesting ways.
Sources
"American Conversation with E.L. Doctorow." National Archives and Records Administration. 25 September 2008. Web. 29 November 2010.
"E.L. Doctorow Biography." BookBrowse. Updated 12 November 2005. Web. 28 November 2010.
Book Review
By: Liz Lemmon
Even before the Broadway musical and the film, Ragtime was E.L. Doctorow's best known work, a celebrated novel that combines the syncopation of ragtime and the literary sensibilities of a writer intrigued by history as literary device. Set primarily in Westchester County's New Rochelle but also in New York City and, briefly, Massachusetts, the novel follows the stories of real and fictional characters as they move from innocence to disillusionment, from peace time to the beginnings of racial conflict and World War I.
Because the novel contains so many stories, some as short as a few pages (in the case of Freud) and some woven throughout the entire novel, describing the plot of the book is a challenge. The author primarily follows the lives of a New Rochelle family (Father, Mother, Younger Brother, and the Little Boy) as they navigate changing times. Father accompanies Peary on his exploration to the North Pole. Mother takes in a young black woman, Sarah, and her newborn, an impulsive act which leads to the introduction of ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker and his simple demands which escalate into violence. Younger Brother becomes infatuated with the celebrated beauty Evelyn Nesbit, which in turn leads to his association with anarchist Emma Goldman. Harry Houdini's car breaks down in front of their house, and the novel enters his story as well. The family acts as a touchstone for the disparate stories of a generation. Meanwhile, the story of a counterpart family - Mameh, Tateh, and the Little Girl - unfolds in the ghetto, where the Jewish immigrant family struggles for survival. Unbeknownst to both families, their stories are linked by those of the others.
In syncopated prose that dissipates partway through the novel as the short age of ragtime gives way to jazz, Doctorow manages to infuse irony in short, seemingly unrelated sentences: "Everyone wore white in the summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes." Since the novel is about the loss of the naiveté that gives birth to such generalizations, this kind of set-up allows for the numerous tales that shoot off in different directions.
The complicated novel is not demanding to read, although the huge cast of characters and the emphasis on history makes emotional identification with the characters difficult. If readers look at this novel as an Impressionistic look at life at the beginning of the 20th century, they will find more satisfaction than if they regard it as the story of Little Boy's family. The coherence of this novel comes from the brackets of an era and not from a tidy relation among the plots. I highly recommend this influential novel for serious readers and students of literature.
Source: Wesselmann, Debbie Lee. "A Riff on American at the Turn of the 20th Century." Amazon. 2 December 2004. Web. 11 December 2010. <http://www.amazon.com/Ragtime-L-Doctorow/dp/0452279070>
Historical Links
By: Amy Ankenbrandt
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40715F6385D0C738EDDAB0994DF484D81&ref=e_l_doctorow&pagewanted=2
This is a New York Times article written about the author of Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow. He describes the influences on his writing, and demonstrates Doctorow’s clever writing style; and this could be an extremely useful piece of literature when discussing the historical novel aspects of the story. I believe that having students read this article in correlation to the creation of a response to the creativity along with solid facts that must go into a historical novel, could be extremely useful in the classroom.
http://ucblibrary3.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Speeches/index.html
This is a compilation of documented speeches delivered by Emma Goldman. I think that these could be greatly utilized in the classroom if students compared these speeches with those of which she delivers in the novel. There are many educational purposes to this assignment, including but not limited to compare and contrast essays and stylistic aspects of speech vs. written.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/ford.htm
This website gives large descriptions of the assembly line and the development of the Model T in relation to Henry Ford’s life. I think that having students use these two topics as a basis for larger resource projects would be a very useful web-quest, which could be further supplemented by a response detailing the significance of that topic/object specifically in the novel. (I think it is important to note, there are many different topics for which this assignment could be used.)
http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780812978186&view=tg
This is a website created by Random House to provide educators with many different ideas including: vocabulary lists, discussion questions, and project prompts. It also provides backgrounds and explanations placed in an educational context. While this list may not provide a teacher with an exact unit plan, it does provide a teacher with a strong basis to formulate a more specific unit for the classroom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTt7RL0PLbA
This youtube video shows the trailer for the 1981 movie Ragtime based off of the novel. I believe that using this video as an opening to the unit could get students intrigued about what is to come. We could use this as an opportunity for students to brainstorm on possible foreshadowing. Furthermore, the actual movie could be watched as a closer, so students will be able to make comparison between the novel and the film.
Historical links and annotations courtesy of Julia Mihelich
