Doctorow on the making of Ragtime

Doctorow on the Making of Ragtime


How I Made It: E.L. Doctorow on 'Ragtime'

* By Boris Kachka
* Published Apr 7, 2008 (New York magazine)


(Photo: Jerry Bauer/Courtesy of E.L. Doctorow)

R agtime is a sprawling work that began with … your own old house in New Rochelle?
My previous book, The Book of Daniel, had been published the year before, and I had been emotionally depleted by it. So I sat around for a year. And I was staring at the wall, and had arranged my desk so that the only way out was through the sentences. I began to write about the wall, and I realized that this house was the first house on the hill built at that time. And then I imagined what things looked like from the bottom of the hill. From one image to another, I was off the wall and in a book.



And then you did some research?
When you’re working well, you don’t do research. Whatever you need comes to you. Walking around town was very much a part of it. I wrote a scene where Tateh and the little girl take trolleys up through Westchester, but I didn’t know if it was possible to take streetcars all the way up to Massachusetts. I was walking through the Public Library in midtown and banged my knee on a book and looked down, and I picked it up. It was a corporate history of trolley-car companies. This is the way the book was assembled.

You grew up in New York in the thirties, so there must be memories of long-gone places in there, too.
I know that I set off for college in Ohio from the old Penn Station, which is why I was able to describe it. And when I was a college student, a friend of mine was graduating and he sold me his Model T Ford. Even then [in the fifties], it was an antique. Fifteen dollars, and he totally overcharged me.

You’ve spoken a lot about nineteenth-century inspirations. What about your contemporaries?
I can’t think of any. There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was The Adventures of Augie March—the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was the U.S.A. trilogy, by John Dos Passos. It’s interesting that of those thirties writers, he was the most self-effacing, and he had the most ambitious project of all, more ambitious than anything Hemingway or Faulkner did. I think I picked that up from him.

Right down to the modesty? You weren’t exactly shouting from the rooftops like Mailer.
Mailer made a terrible mistake. He often stood between his readers and his work. That kind of assiduous pursuit of celebrity, that’s not me.

You were praised and criticized for using historical figures—Ford, Morgan, Houdini—in fiction, as if it were a brand-new thing.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. I thought, If they want fact, I’ll give them facts that will leave their heads spinning.

It’s hard to think there was a time when this kind of thing was controversial.
I heard secondhand that the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, was very critical of the book, that someone prepared a major review and he said no. I had transgressed in making up words and thoughts that people had never said. Now it happens almost every day. I think that opened the gates.

What else did the book do?
Well, after the book was published, I got a letter from the then-director of the Morgan Library, and he said he wanted to thank me, because as a result of my book [in which a black militant threatens to blow up the building], they were able to persuade the trustees to spring for the money to install a state-of-the-art security system.

12/17 O'Connor, E.B. White, Ragtime

A good discussion of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" yesterday.

For today, bring some closure to that discussion.
SO, WHAT ARE THE DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF THE "SOUTHERN GOTHIC" WRITING STYLE? Both Faulkner and O'Connor employ elements of the grotesque and examine moral flaws and failures. Any connections to be made?

Discuss E. B. White's short essay "About Myself"---What is his purpose? Who is his audience? What rhetorical strategies does he employ to achieve his purpose in this essay? Does the essay employ satire or irony? Rhetorical mode---description---but does White accomplish the task of describing himself (or any man or woman) in this essay?

If time permits--begin watching RAGTIME...Carry on....

Tomorrow Assignments and Extra Credit Opportunity

We are going to finish the following presentations today:
*Death and Dying in As I Lay Dying
*Journey in As I Lay Dying
*Motivations in As I Lay Dying


For tomorrow:
Please read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Conner and "About Myself" by E.B. White.

Because I printed out the copies, please annotate!

We will also be picking up your next book Ragtime tomorrow.

Extra Credit for the Prezi Project:

For extra credit, you must have the extra credit completed for tomorrow! This is extra credit for your whole group. If you do not have a Facebook account, then you will not participate in this extra credit -- however as long as your group complete the requirements then the whole group will receive the extra credit.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1015hZr-WuRN2JkNGE1MDgtYzFmNy00ZTUzLTg5ZmUtZmUwMDk0OWNiMWE2&hl=en

Presentations -- Monday and Tuesday

Agenda:

*10 minutes to prepare with your group
*Group Presentations for the remainder of the period
*Question and Answers after each presentation

The order of your presentations:

Alientation and Loneliness
Modern Text
Death and Dying
Journeys
Motivations

Please post your url of your project on the comments of this post.

Presentations Monday and Tuesday

Be prepared to present your presentations on Monday. I am shooting for around ten minutes for each group. If you go over, that is perfectly fine. WIth that said, a group or two may be bumped to present on Tuesday.

I will give you ten minutes at the beginning of class to collaborate with your group members to solidify the presentation or make those decisions of who you want to speak and present when.

See you Monday!

Continue Presentations

Be ready to present your presentations on Monday. That way, you will have the weekend to finish up your presentations at home.

Be prepared to present and teach the class about your topic for AT LEAST ten minutes.

Because of that, we will probably run into presentations on Tuesday, as well.

As I Lay Dying Prezi Presentations

Today you will begin working with your group to create a Prezi to teach us about your topic.

You will create a Prezi something like this:

As I Lay Dying: Comedy or Tragedy
http://prezi.com/3m9vq1mvdpyx/

Check this out!



For the rest of the period:

* Begin brainstorming and blocking out your information for your presentation with your group.

For a PDF version of the project guidelines handed out in class: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1015hZr-WuRNmEyNTJhYjctNjQwZS00ZmE0LTgxMmEtODdmNTg0ZDQwNWZk&hl=en

* Create a FREE Prezi.com account here:
https://prezi.com/profile/registration/?license_type=PUBLIC

DON'T FORGET TO WRITE DOWN YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION AND PASSWORDS.

Tomorrow be prepared to continue to work on the presentations with your groups!