The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be.
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