#Ragtime el doctorow chapter summary movie
#Ragtime el doctorow chapter summary full

#Ragtime el doctorow chapter summary movie

The movie Ragtime took elements from the book but didn’t capture its scope or point of view. Perhaps unconnected to the novel it would be a fine movie, but I remember how jarring it felt to see whole lead characters and story lines from the book excised while minor characters and incidents from the book took up huge amounts of screen time. I remember my parents and me being disappointed with the movie Ragtime. I did see the movie version and the musical adaptation. I actually haven’t reread it yet since then (perhaps I should or perhaps I should not mess with the childhood memory). Doctorow novel, understandable considering the impact it had on me at a young age. I’m not kidding, it really felt that visceral to me.īut Ragtime will probably always remain my favorite E. Billy Bathgate has sentences that stretch out over half a page but instead of losing the thread of the thought as I might with other writers’ over-long constructions, reading Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate sentences was like swimming along in a delicious stream of thick and smooth honey mead. My most sensually delightful experience with E. City of God made heavy intellectual demands, changing literary styles again and again within itself. Loon Lake’s prose, like The Book of Daniel, was tougher and dense. His most popular historical novels like Ragtime or The March or World’s Fair are written in beautiful prose that effortlessly draws you in to a richly told tale. I learned that Doctorow was a writer who would change literary styles and voices for each novel, sometimes quite dramatically. It was too dense and difficult for me at that age. Here Doctorow’s prose changed completely. I quickly moved on to Doctorow’s debut novel, the wry western “Welcome to Hard Times”, and then hit a wall when I attempted “The Book of Daniel”.

#Ragtime el doctorow chapter summary full

And what a ride! Such a sprawling epic of the beginning of the American 20 th Century, full of colorful, diverse characters and incidents! As such Ragtime made an excellent introduction to sophisticated adult literature for a boy who was a casual book reader at best.

I wasn’t following the text, it was taking me along on a ride. The prose was intelligent and the storytelling complex, yet the language was not only deceptively easy to read, it practically pulled me along. I was enthralled by the sprawling historical fiction that mixed historical and imagined characters and events in a glorious literary melting pot. I was either ten or eleven years old when I picked up my parents’ already well-worn paperback edition. Doctorow’s most famous work, “Ragtime”, was the first “grown-up” book I read. I intend to catch up with those three as of yet unread Doctorow books (I love books but I am not a voracious reader and my “want-to-read” list only keeps growing…).Į. I have read nine of his twelve books, a ratio and record I have equaled in passion and loyalty with only two other contemporary authors, John Irving and J. Doctorow, one of the giants of contemporary literature has passed.