DOCTOROW, E. L. Ragtime. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2001.

Octavo. Full red leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gold decoration to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Tan satin ribbon page marker. 270 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, Collector's Notes, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Random House, 1975.

E. L. Doctorow (1931–2015) was born in New York City, studied at Kenyon College and Columbia, and worked for years as an editor at Dial Press before the success of his fiction made other employment beside the point. He is the author of eleven novels, three of which — The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), and Billy Bathgate (1989) — are generally considered the most significant; his honours include three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. He died in July 2015, giving signed copies of his work posthumous significance.

Ragtime, published in 1975, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and established Doctorow as one of the essential American novelists of his generation. The novel is set in the years between the turn of the century and the First World War, and works by weaving fictional characters through the lives of historical figures with a freedom that was, at the time, formally radical. Three families and communities serve as its main centres: an affluent white family in New Rochelle, identified only by their familial roles (Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, the boy); Coalhouse Walker Jr., a Black ragtime pianist from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice in the face of racism drives him toward revolutionary violence; and Tateh, a Jewish socialist immigrant who reinvents himself through the nascent film industry. Moving through these lives — and through each other's with a freedom history rarely permits — come Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Sigmund Freud, and Evelyn Nesbit.

The novel's central argument is about America itself: the tensions between its promise of reinvention and its systematic exclusions, between the surface gaiety of the ragtime era and the violence that ran beneath it. Doctorow renders this argument not through direct statement but through the juxtaposition of his fictional and historical figures — the formal method is the meaning. The New York Times described it as "a mesmerising historical vision." Miloš Forman's 1981 film adaptation starred James Cagney in the last role of his career; a Broadway musical adaptation in 1998, with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, won four Tony Awards.

Near fine. A few faint markings along gilt edges; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000571