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Welcome to turn-of-the-century America, where Scott Joplin's ragtime sets the beat and passionate vitality sets the tone. Harry Houdini astounds audiences with feats of magic escape. J.P. Morgan rules the world of finance lie a Roman Emperor. Emma Goldman preaches revolution, free love, and feminism. Henry Ford finds way to build cars by turning men into machines. And a beautiful ex-chorus girl named Evelyn Nesbitt sparks the murder of a great architect by a mad millionaire and begins to turn from a sexual doll into an awakening woman. These real-life characters mingle with a Lower East Side Jewish peddler, a black musician from Harlem, and a rebellious young suburban middle-class WASP in the classic E.L. Doctorow novel that interweaves a spellbinding story with a full-colored mosaic of a time, a place and a people losing their innocence and giving birth to an age when anything and everything goes.

"'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."

Stanley Kauffmann, Saturday Review, 07/26/1975

"'Ragtime' is as exhilarating as a deep breath of pure oxygen....At times, the swift, short sentences suggest the pristine flicker of silent films; at others, the sharp angles and sardonic deployment of detail in 'Citizen Kane'....The grace and surface vivacity of 'Ragtime' make it enormous fun to read. But beneath its peppy, bracing rhythms sound the neat, sad waltz of 'Gatsby' and the tunes of betrayed promise. History resonates with special clarity here. Doctorow has found a fresh way to orchestrate the themes of American innocence, energy, and inchoate ambition."

Newsweek

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