21 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
RESOURCES
Primary Works
Boris Kachka, “E. L. Doctorow on Ragtime,” New York, 41 (14 April 2008): 69.
Interview in which Doctorow discusses his sources of inspiration for Ragtime: his
childhood home in the New York suburb of New Rochelle and novels by John
Dos Passos and Saul Bellow. He also responds to criticisms of the novel.
Christopher D. Morris, ed., Conversations with E. L. Doctorow ( Jackson: Univer-
sity Press of Mississippi, 1999).
Highly useful resource with interviews from 1975 to 1997, a chronology, and an
introduction that provides an overview of Doctorow’s biography and the critical
reception of his work.
Allen Weinstein, “American Conversations with the Archivist of the United
States: E. L. Doctorow” (25 September 2008) http://www.archives.
gov/about/archivist/conversations/.
Video and transcript of a lengthy and informative interview conducted by former
archivist Weinstein at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Doctorow
discusses the intersections between mythology and history, his college education,
and how he began to use history in his fiction.
Criticism
Laura Barrett, “Compositions of Reality: Photography, History, and Ragtime,”
Modern Fiction Studies, 46 (Winter 2000): 801–824.
Examines photography as a trope in the novel.
Hillary Chute, “Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay, and the Framing of Comics,” Modern
Fiction Studies, 54 (Summer 2008): 268–301.
Compares Doctorow’s and Michael Chabon’s novels, emphasizing the two writ-
ers’ attention to twentieth-century visual media.
Anthony B. Dawson, “Ragtime and the Movies: The Aura of the Duplicable,”
Mosaic, 16 (Winter–Spring 1983): 205–214.
Focuses on the depiction of social and economic relationships in the film and the
novel.
Barbara Foley, “From U .S .A. to Ragtime: Notes on the Forms of Historical
Consciousness in Modern Fiction,” American Literature, 50 (1978): 85–105;
reprinted in Trenner, pp. 158–179.
Compares Ragtime unfavorably to John Dos Passos’s trilogy.
Douglas Fowler, Understanding E. L. Doctorow (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1992).
Discusses Doctorow’s intentions, inventions, and politics in his works. Chapter 4
is an extended analysis of Ragtime.
Marshall Bruce Gentry, “Elusive Villainy: The Waterworks as Doctorow’s Poesque
Preface,” South Atlantic Review, 67 (Winter 2002): 63–90.