Ragtime by EL

Doctorow
Livingston Morris
 • The plot of Ragtime is in the early 1900’s during the Progressive era
• Starts with a wealthier family in New Rochelle, New York (mother,
father, younger brother of mother) (family business is a firework
company)
• Father leaves for an artic voyage leaving mother alone
Plot Summary
• Jumps to an immigrant family ( Tetah and a little girl)
• Evelyn Nesbit helps take care of that little girl (actual person in history)
• Younger brother falls in love with Evelyn Nesbit/ Mother ends up
falling in love with the dad of the immigrant family
• Mother takes in a baby that was left in their backyard and later on tracks
down the mother who left it there (Sarah) and take her in as well
• Coalhouse falls in love with Sarah, Sarah gets beaten for trying to
submit her petition to the federal government & coalhouse gets car and
self beaten by firefighters and cops, coalhouse goes throughout the rest
of the book trying to avenge Sarah’s death by protesting and blowing up
fire stations
 • Injustice
“One Hundred Negroes a year were lynched. One
hundred miners were burned alive. One hundred
children were mutilated. There seemed to be quotas for
these things. There seemed to be quotas for death by
starvation”.
Themes • Feminism
“She thought about Father a good deal. The events
since his return from the Arctic, his responses to them,
had broken her faith in him. During his absence she saw
him for the dreary unimaginative thing he was”.
• Change
“Father related it to the degrees of turn in the moral
planet. He saw it everywhere, this new season, and it
bewildered him. At his office he was told that the
seamstresses in the flag department had joined a New
York union”.
 • Ragtime puts a fictional story behind a
factual time period to glorify history in a
way that the reader can relate to
•Includes real life characters:
Historical Criticism
• Harry Houdini
• Evelyn Nesbit
• JP Morgan
• Henry Ford
• Booker T Washington
• Marilyn Monroe
• Archduke Franz