Stock photo.

Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

Doctorow's novel takes place in turn-of-the-century New York, and mingles real-life and fictional characters. The plot involves the Evelyn Nesbit-Stanford White intrigue, but also includes a black musician and his girlfriend, a Jewish peddler on the Lower East Side, and a coterie of wealthy Anglo-Saxons in pursuit of wealth. Time magazine called RAGTIME one of the 10 best books of the 1970s, and it was made into a successful musical.

Available editions of Ragtime

	9780786102976, Audio Cassette, Blackstone Audio Inc, 1993 None currently available

	9780553010404, Book, Bantam Books, 1976 $3.23 (Used - Good) Other copies of 9780553010404

	9780679600886, Hardcover, Random House Inc, 1994 $3.95 (Good) Other copies of 9780679600886

	9780816163069, Book, G. K. Hall, 1975 $2.49 (Good) Other copies of 9780816163069

	9780452275706, Paperback, Penguin USA, 1996 $1.55 (Very Good) Other copies of 9780452275706

	9780812978186, Paperback, Random House Inc, 2007 $6.92 (Fair) Other copies of 9780812978186

	9780553257366, Paperback, Bantam Books, 1975 $1.00 (Used, Good) Other copies of 9780553257366

	9780679736264, Paperback, Random House Inc, 1991 $1.00 (Used - Good) Other copies of 9780679736264

	9780449214282, Paperback, Ballantine Books, 1989 $1.00 (Very Good ) Other copies of 9780449214282

	9780394469010, Hardcover, Random House Inc, 1981 $1.00 (Very Good ) Other copies of 9780394469010

	9781885608277, Audio Cassette, Airplay Inc, 1997 $36.99 (Very Good) Other copies of 9781885608277

	9780679602972, Hardcover, Modern Library, 1997 $8.50 (Good) Other copies of 9780679602972

Publisher Notes

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, disap-pears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sig- mund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorows 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.The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-able hardbound editions of impor-tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Librarys seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoringas its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

Media Reviews

"'Ragtime' is 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 both as method and historical datum, shaken by a continental pulse....Its central excellence is its central vision, the idea of the book, which is generative without being obsessive, original without being clever."