Ragtime 1975 by E. L. Doctorow

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Ragtime (1975) by E. L. Doctorow
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Biography

• Edgar Laurence Doctorow born 1931 New York City
• Named after fellow Bronx native Edgar Allan Poe
• Graduated from KenyonCollege with honors, 1952
• Graduate work atColumbia University

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Bio (contd)

• 195964 senior editor for New American Library
• 196469 editor-in-chief at Dial Press
• several teaching positions
• UC Irvine
• Sarah Lawrence U
• Yale Drama
• Princeton U
• currently at NYU (Glucksman Chair of American
  Letters)

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Principal Works

• Welcome to Hard Times (1960)
• The Book of Daniel (1971)
• Ragtime (1975) National Book Critics Circle Award
• transformed into a film in 1980
• adapted into a musical in 1998
• Loon Lake (1980)
• Lives of the Poets Six Stories and a Novella
  (1984)

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Principal Works (contd)

• World's Fair (1985) National Book Award
• Billy Bathgate (1989) National Book Award,
  PEN/Faulkner Award
• Waterworks (1994)
• City of God (2000)
• Reporting the Universe (2003 - non fiction)
• Sweet Land Stories (2004)
• The March (2005)

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Doctorow facts

• wrote Ragtime in 1975 takes place ca. 190617
• sat in New Rochelle home, tried to imagine house
  and neighborhood in 1910
• father turned down a chance to star opposite
  Pearl White in Perils of Pauline.

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Doctorow on Writing

• Writing is a socially acceptable form of
  schizophrenia.
• It's like driving a car at night. You never see
  further than your headlights, but you can make
  the whole trip that way.
• The writer isnt made in a vacuum. Writers are
  witnesses. The reason we need writers is because
  we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

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Doctorow on history/fiction

• History is a kind of fiction in which we live and
  hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of
  speculative history, perhaps a superhistory, by
  which the available data for the composition is
  seen to be greater and more various in its
  sources than the historian supposes. there is no
  fiction or nonfiction as we commonly under-stand
  the distinction there is only narrative.

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Doctorow on Ragtimes relation to history

• Certain details were so delicious that I was
  scrupulous about getting them right. Others
  demanded to be changed, peoples lives demanded
  to be mythologized.
• He also claims to be no longer sure which
  historical facts he invented and which he took
  from recorded history.

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Whats a romance novel?

• character is likely to be abstract and ideal
• astonishing events of the plot are likely to
  have a symbolic or ideological, rather than a
  realistic, plausibility.
• Ragtime fits this definition.

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Doctorow on novelists

• Blames not outside forces but American novelists
  themselves for a willingness to dwell in a sort
  of unresounding private life. Since the future
  for any of us is not individual, he advocates
  books with less polish and self-consciousness,
  but ones about the way power works in our
  society, who has it, and how it is making
  history.

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Doctorow on history

• History is the present. Thats why every
  generation writes it anew. But what most people
  think of as history is its end product, myth.
• There is no history except as it is composed.
  That is why history has to be written and
  rewritten from one generation to another. The act
  of composition can never end.

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References

• http//en.thinkexist.com/quotes/e._l._doctorow/
• http//www.albany.edu/writers-inst/doctorow.html
• http//www.answers.com/topic/e-l-doctorow
• http//www.easthamptonstar.com/20040909/col5.htm
• http/www.biography.ms/E._L._Doctorow.html

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Test Wednesday

• Will cover material through Ragtime
• Several short ID items works, terminology,
  author biography, presentations posted on website
• Several longer ID items quotations from works
  (work, character, context)
• One written response
• Closed book, open syllabus to remind you of the
  works weve read. May use dictionary.
• Those who have read the works, handouts, and
  headnotes thoughtfully and understand how the
  literary terms apply to the works should do well.