Ragtime | Suggested Reading

Ragtime What Do I Read Next?

The character of Coalhouse Walker Jr. is based upon the character Michael Kohlhaas from an 1808 novella written by German author Heinrich von Kleist. "Michael Kohlhaas" is included in Tales, which is a collection of von Kleist's novellas, and also in Twelve German Novellas, edited and translated by Harry Steinhauer, published by the University of California Press in 1977.

All of Doctorow's novels use Ragtime's technique of intertwining history with fiction, to varying degrees. Especially noteworthy among them are The Book of Daniel, published in 1971, which resembles Ragtime in that it gives a rare look at dissident politics in America (it is loosely based on the 1951 execution of accused spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), and The Waterworks, published in 1994, which gives an eerily convincing sense of Now York society in the 1870s.

The novels that John Dos Passos wrote in the 1920s and 1930s were...
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