Study Guide to Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, published the year the Vietnam War came to a close in 1975. As a work of historical fiction, Ragtime uses a turn-of-the-century America as a pedestal to showcase issues such as freedom, identity, and justice. Moreover, Doctorow was one of the first to use magic realism to discuss and dissect the nature of change. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Doctorow’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO E. L. DOCTOROW

LIFE AND WORKS

E. L. Doctorow, carrying a stuffed plastic bag, got on the elevator at the ninth floor. He turned his back to my daughter and me, faced the button panel, and punched B for basement.

But it’s time, I thought, that he and I, both teachers of writing at New York University, get to recognize each other at least in the elevator. So:

“That,” I said to my daughter in a loud stage whisper, “is E. L. Doctorow.”

Her eyes widened as only a ten-year-old’s eyes can widen.

“Did he do Ragtime?” she asked.

Naturally, I swelled with pride. She could make an instantaneous connection between the book on my night table and the name of the bearded, balding man in the elevator.

When the elevator door opened at the lobby, she and I stepped forward, but . . .

“And do you know what I’m going to do now?” He suddenly bent down toward her. “I’m going to do the laundry.”

SHY BUT WITTY

No matter how often he and I have talked since then, I remember that first brief exchange as typical. His shyness first of all. He would have preferred to descend unrecognized and speechless to the laundry room in the basement. He always moves in public life a fugitive from casual interruptions. But once recognized, he has to say something witty. He seized on her use of do for write. And in his answer he put doing laundry on the same level as doing Ragtime. He was expanding her image of a great author by letting her know he had to wash his clothes as well as write his books. For years afterward she has remembered the lesson. In her own short stories, the narrator, if no one else, always lives a well-balanced life. In one of them, she describes a balding, bearded man emerging from an elevator pushing a typewriter on a wheeled table swiftly out toward his car and loading this precious equipment into the back seat. He has kept one eye open just enough to get these things done safely. He has looked at no one, neither the doorman nor his colleagues standing in the plaza. He drives off to his house in New Rochelle.

WHERE RAGTIME WAS BORN

That’s the house that gave him the inspiration for Ragtime. He and his wife, the novelist Helen Henslee, bought it in the sixties. That’s where he lives and writes when he’s not with us at NYU. It’s the house he describes in the opening paragraph of the novel:

In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadway Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers. . . .

As Doctorow tells us, he thought he was working on a novel based on the life of Dr. James Pike, an Episcopal bishop who disappeared in the Israeli desert in 1969. But Doctorow found himself in a desert, a dry spell, a “writer’s block.” Thinking about the time Pike was born, at the beginning of the century, he stared and stared at the wall, also born at that time.

“Hey! This house!” he thought. He started writing about it. “And all those images came to me. I was off on a book and it had nothing to do with James Pike.”

HOW DOCTOROW WRITES

You won’t be surprised then to hear this description of how he writes:

“I write to find out what it is I’m writing about. I just punch around until something gives way. Then, if it keeps going, it’s a book.”

His approach has inspired scores of happy writing students at NYU, where he has an endowed professorship. He has also taught at the University of California (Irvine), Princeton, the University of Utah, and Sarah Lawrence College.

FAMILY INFLUENCE

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1931, early in The Great Depression. His parents apparently had a literary career in mind for him. They took his first name from Edgar Allan Poe, the great poet and fiction writer who had also lived in the Bronx. (Doctorow tells me that his middle name was not taken after the novelist D. H. Lawrence but after a relative.) He grew up amidst intellectual and political conversation. His mother was a pianist and his father owned a music store, both factors predisposing him to write Ragtime. Both parents were second-generation Americans descended from Russian Jews, a resource also drawn on in Ragtime. When he was fourteen his brother returned from World War II and sat down at the kitchen table to write a novel. Young Edgar had all the cues he needed.

EDUCATION

From the Bronx High School of Science he went to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, one of the main literary centers in America. He was a student of John Crowe Ransom, distinguished poet and critic, but he majored in philosophy, another important factor in his orientation as a writer. He spent the academic year 1952 - 1953 doing graduate work in drama at Columbia University. One dramatist he studied has had a permanent effect on Doctorow: the German Romanticist, Heinrich von Kleist. Doctorow is author of a splendid introduction to an English edition of Kleist’s plays. Doctorow has also modeled his Ragtime character Coalhouse Walker on the hero of Kleist’s novel Michael Kohlhaas.

At Columbia he also met Helen Henslee, a novelist who became his wife. While he was serving in the Army of Occupation in 1953 - 1955, their first of three children was born in an Army hospital in Frankfurt, Germany. Back home, he worked as a reservations clerk at LaGuardia Airport and then as a reader for CBS Television and Motion Pictures. He had to write reports on the cinematic possibilities in new novels - at the rate of a book a day! At least he learned a great deal about genre novels (westerns and science fiction) that he could use in his first two books, in which he combined serious philosophical themes with genre subject matter.

GENRE NOVELS

In 1960 he published Welcome to Hard Times, a western set in the Dakota Territory in the 1800s. He cast it in the form of a journal kept by the mayor of the frontier town of Hard Times. In recording the town’s problems he also explored the nature of evil, its power over idealism, and the nature of American culture. In 1966, while working as editor at Dial Press, Doctorow issued his second book, Big as Life. This was a science-fantasy about people thrown together in an emergency when two human giants are discovered off Manhattan. The theme was the malaise of modern humanity. I say was because Doctorow has since withdrawn this book; it is his only book OP (out of print, at his own request).

FIRST MAJOR WORK

In 1971 Doctorow published The Book of Daniel, his first work to earn critical acclaim. Daniel is the son of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, characters modeled on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed for conspiracy to commit treason during the McCarthy Era. Daniel writes his Book to come to terms with his confusion and outrage over his parents’ death.

FIRST FAMOUS NOVEL

Four years later (1975) Ragtime appeared. Doctorow wanted this novel to “reach vast new constituencies”; he wanted “gas station attendants to read it.” And everybody did. It sold 200,000 copies in hardcover the first year, netted a huge paperback sale ($2,000,000), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and was (ultimately) translated into film. All this in spite of the facts that this novel is highly experimental and highly critical of America. As Bruce Weber described it in a major New York Times Magazine article, Ragtime is an indictment of the complacent upper classes, a portrayal of “scabrous capitalists.” But, since Ragtime is our main subject in this Note, let’s postpone further talk about it for later chapters.

FRUITFUL EIGHTIES

Now internationally famous, in great demand as a speaker, Doctorow turned out four new books in the eighties. Loon Lake (1980) is a novel about an ambitious drifter during The Great Depression. Like Ragtime, it features contrasts between wealth and poverty, but it focuses more on the problems of organized labor. And like Ragtime, Loon Lake is a successful experiment in the problems of literary point-of-view (more on this later). Doctorow’s next work, Lives of the Poets (1984), is a collection of six short stories and a novella. Here he develops in fiction what is also a dominant theme in some of his major essays and speeches of the eighties (see “Bibliography”): the relationship between art and politics. The narrator, Jonathan, is in a state of frustration about the purpose and value of fiction. Nevertheless, two years later Doctorow’s sixth novel appeared: World’s Fair. He says it’s about “growing up in the Bronx, without the egg cream.” The experiences of young Edgar Altschuler, the protagonist, reflect the troubles of a world drifting from the Great Depression into World War II. “A child,” Doctorow says, “is a perception machine. It’s his job to perceive.” And so World’s Fair contains some of the most poetic and memorable descriptions in American literature: of an ice igloo the Bronx boys build, of the great dirigible Hindenburg passing overhead, of the New York World’s Fair of 1939. World’s Fair won the American Book Award for Fiction.

The Bronx is also the scene of Doctorow’s 1989 bestseller, Billy Bathgate. The protagonist is now fifteen, a high school dropout who becomes the gofer for the notorious gangster of the thirties, Dutch Schultz. Doctorow tells us that what interested him here is “the mythic dimensions in which we place gangsters.” The noted critic John Leonard went further and identified the mythic parallel, calling Bathgate “a fairy tale about capitalism.”

DOCTOROW THE PUBLIC FIGURE

He laments the tendency of American writers - under pressure from critics and publishers - to isolate themselves from public affairs. In spite of a busy teaching schedule and a steady output during the eighties of fiction, drama, and nonfiction, Doctorow has found time to take a public stand on important cultural and political issues. Just a few examples: in 1980 he testified before a Senate subcommittee, deploring the tendency of publishing houses to be absorbed by the entertainment industry, with “all its values of pandering to the lowest common denominator of public taste.” In 1983 he delivered the commencement address at Sarah Lawrence, calling Ronald Reagan “the most foolish and insufficient President in our history.” About the neoconservative critics he said: “There is a strong presumption among them that if writers can’t say anything good about the country, they shouldn’t say anything at all. Worse, that our social critiques are not acts of love but acts of treason.” Later that year he told the Friends of the New York Public Library that it’s a mistake for us “to lend ourselves to film culture” which in all probability “has increased illiteracy.” That year he also visited Peking (Beijing) where he expressed horror over the American Embassy’s encouraging the Chinese to translate and publish American books - without compensation to the American authors!

“My God,” he said, “you wouldn’t give away Coca-Cola, would you?”

In 1984 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1985 he was one of the leading spirits in a lively controversy over politics of literature at the Twentieth International PEN Conference, sponsored by the New York PEN American Center (of which he is vice president). Later that year he published “The Passion of Our Calling,” an appeal to American writers to join the writers of the rest of the world who exercise their right to be involved in politics. More recently he has surfaced in Long Island, where he has a summer home, as one of the organizers of an annual three day weekend called “The Sag Harbor Initiative.” S...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to E. L. Doctorow
• 2) Introduction to Ragtime
• 3) Themes and Techniques
• 4) Textual Analysis
• 5) Character Studies
• 6) Ideas for Papers, Oral Reports, and Class Discussion
• 7) Bibliography