Silk elements1/7/2024 One obituary called her both an “incorrigible revolutionist” and a “writer of distinction,” and she was known to defend free love and homosexuality at a time when vocal support for either was practically unheard-of.īorn in Imperial Russia, Goldman immigrated as a teenager to the United States, where a stint in a corset factory helped draw her into the burgeoning anarchist and labor movements. “If you ask whether some things in the book ‘really’ happened, I can only say, ‘They have now.’”ĭoctorow portrays Emma Goldman as a sexual, intellectual whirlwind, hewing closely to the spirit of the real woman. “People’s lives demanded to be mythologized,” Doctorow said at the time of the book’s release. Doctorow described consulting photographs and biographies to construct his characters, with certain details making it into the text unchanged - “for instance, the number of animals Teddy Roosevelt killed on his African safari.” (Though even some of these facts have been massaged: Doctorow combined the number of animals shot by both Roosevelt and his son Kermit, which totaled 512 on a single trip.) Other elements he treated with even greater latitude - for example, an imagined meeting between John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford. Some familiar faces show up in the novel for a single paragraph, an efficient hit of verisimilitude and context, while others are given rich interior lives and plot-shaping action. In fact, dozens of the characters in “Ragtime” actually lived and breathed in the early 1900s, and most were fixtures of the front page: politicians, socialites, entertainers, intellectuals.
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