Like looking in a mirror...

Just thought I'd share a couple photos that I've taken.  The first is an "American goods" store in Stratford, England.

The second is a "British goods" store from Ventura, California.

I don't have any point to make here.  Our special relationship seems to be going strong (cheerio!)

1975: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

The Author:

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (1931-      ) was born in the Bronx.  He later studied philosophy at Kenyon College and briefly attended Columbia University for graduate studies in English drama before being drafted into the military, where he served from 1953-1955.  While overseas, he met and married Helen Setzer.  Upon returning the the U.S., he worked as a manuscript reader for Columbia Pictures, then as an editor for the New American Library from 1959-64.  In 1960, he published his first novel, a western titled Welcome to Hard Times.  In 1964, Doctorow became the editor-in-chief of Dial Press and in 1966 published his second novel, this time sci-fi, called Big as Life.  It wasn't until 1971 that Doctorow wrote his first historical fiction novel, The Book of Daniel, about the Rosenberg trial.  The book was a critical success and was a finalist for the National Book Award.  In 1975, Doctorow published Ragtime, his most popular book, which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.   Since then, Doctorow has published eight novels, three short story collections, and two books of essays.  is most recent novel, Andrew's Brain, was published earlier this year.

The Book:

Length: 334 pages
Genre/Subject: Historical fiction/Early 20th Century New York

Ragtime takes place over the course of the opening decade and a half of the twentieth century.  It focuses on three main fictional groups, the unnamed upper middle class white family living the American dream (named simply Father, Mother, and Mother's Younger Brother), a poor Jewish immigrant (Tateh) and his daughter, and a black musician from Harlem named Coalhouse Walker.  But what's remarkable about Ragtime is the extent to which real historical personages appear in the story, most notably socialite Evelyn Nesbit, anarchist Emma Goldman, magician Harry Houdini, and industrialist J. P. Morgan.  This puts aside the brief appearances by everyone from Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Henry Ford to Theodore Dreiser.  At one point, Freud and Jung take a boat through the Tunnel of Love on Coney Island.

Doctorow raises all the standard but relevant social issues.  Nesbit and Goldman discuss gender, while Coalhouse and Mother's Younger Brother consider race, and Tateh ponders class in American society.  Yet despite the prevalence of these themes in American literature, Doctorow makes them seem fresh, at least in presentation.  One of the most memorable scenes in the novel takes place between Ford and Morgan, sitting down to discuss reincarnation and the idea of Great Men.  Such a meeting almost certainly never happened, and is just one instance of the mixing of the historical and fictional.  However, Doctorow has said:

     "I'm under the illusion that all of my inventions are quite true. For instance, in Ragtime, I'm
     satisfied that everything I made up about Morgan and Ford is true, whether it happened or not.
     Perhaps truer because it didn't happen."    

I think Ragtime is the first postmodern novel on the list.  While novels like Elmer Gantry or Valley of the Dolls can be seen as Roman á clef's, Doctorow makes a concerted effort to make reality and fiction indistinguishable, to draw a line between truth and fact.  It wasn't merely Doctorow that was making massive changes to historical fiction and the fact/truth divide, rather we can see Ragtime as a more accessible example of what was going on.  On the one hand, you had the continued rise of New Journalism.  Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 was called "the least factual, but most accurate account" of the election.  Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow pushes the border between psychological and  magical realism, all in the historical context of World War II.  Ragtime only slightly precedes Robert Coover's The Public Burning, a novel about the Rosenberg trial narrated by Richard Nixon.  While Modernism is usually tied to disillusionment, postmodernism could (in my opinion) be tied to hysteria, that is to say, disillusionment to the point of humor or madness. Note that this is not a negative judgment.

Ragtime was adapted to the screen in 1981.

The film starred James Cagney but had a strangely eclectic cast, with an uncredited appearance by Jack Nicholson, a role filled by The Naked and the Dead author Norman Mailer, and before-they-were-famous performances by Jeff Daniels and Samuel L. Jackson.
In 1998, Ragtime was adapted to the stage.  The musical was nominated for thirteen Tony awards, and won four, losing Best Musical to The Lion King.

Unlike many books so far on the list, Ragtime has maintained much of its popularity.  It was placed at #86 on Modern Library's list of the 100 best books of the 20th century, as well as TIME's 100 best novels since 1923.

Ragtime is definitely worth reading if you like historical fiction, or even if you're just lukewarm on the genre.  It doesn't tread much new ground with on social issues, but it comes at them from a new angle.




Bestselling novels of 1975:

1. Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
2. The Moneychangers by Arthur Hailey
3. Curtain by Agatha Christie
4. Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner
5. The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh
6. The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins
7. The Greek Treasure by Irving Stone
8. The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton
9. Shōgun by James Clavell
10. Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

Also Published in 1975:
The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges
J R by William Gaddis

Sources:

Doctorow, E. L. Ragtime. 1975. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1990. Print.

Mchugh, Frank K. "Doctorow, E.L. (1931- )." Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American 
     Literature. George B. Perkins, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger. Vol. 1. New York: 
     HarperCollins, 1991. 266. Literature Resource Center. Web.

1939: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Author:

            John Steinbeck, Jr. (1902-1968) was born in Salinas, California, a then-rural area in Northern California, to John Ernst Steinbeck Sr., Treasurer for Monterey County, and Olive Hamilton, a former schoolteacher.  He lived in Salinas until he attended Stanford in 1920, but left in 1925 without receiving a degree.  He then moved to New York to start his writing career, but returned to California in 1928.  He published his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929, and married Carol Henning in 1930.  He published a few more works before his first popular success in 1935, Tortilla Flat.  In 1936, he published In Dubious Battle, a labor novel that presaged his next two major works, Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). 

            The social and political fallout from The Grapes of Wrath was as enormous as the public demand for the novel.  The book was widely banned, and in some cases publicly burned.  His marriage fell apart in 1941, and he remarried a year later to Gwyndolyn Conger, with whom he had two sons, Thomas Steinbeck and John Steinbeck IV (the latter of which was a war correspondent in Vietnam who, partnered with Sean Flynn, son of silent film star Errol Flynn, were among the first to bring the My Lai Massacre to the American public’s attention).

            Steinbeck served as a war correspondent in World War Two, and continued writing and publishing both fiction and non-fiction.  In 1948, he and Gwyndolyn divorced.  He married Elaine Scott in 1950.  In 1952, he published East of Eden, often considered his last great novel.  In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  In 1967, he visited the warfront in Vietnam as a journalist.  He passed away in 1968 of congestive heart failure. 

The Book:     

1st edition cover

            It’s The Grapes of Wrath.  What can I say about this book that hasn’t been said and said better than I could possibly say it?  For those of you that have forgotten or haven’t read it (a oversight which I recommend be immediately corrected), The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family,  a family of farmer’s from Oklahoma, displaced by the economic crash of the Great Depression coupled with the agricultural devastation of the Dust Bowl.  Having lost everything, they head to California where work is rumored to abound.  Subject to unexpected kindness and cruelty, the Joads attempt to create a new life for themselves, as do the hundreds of thousands of other displaced workers and farmers who have sought refuge in California.  While I think a lot of us roll our eyes at the phrase “testament to the human spirit,” I am nothing but sincere when I say that The Grapes of Wrath is a testament to the human spirit and one of the truly great novels of the twentieth century. 

            Steinbeck managed not just to capture the specific plights and hopes and culture of the time and people he writes about, but he uses these details to connect to a deeper, timeless truth about the human condition and American identity.  The characters are incredibly realistic, the story is absorbing and meaningful, the prose is colloquial and poetic.  This book is a portrait of the time in which Steinbeck wrote it, and is a protest book as much as anything else: a protest against the denigration of the poor, the hypocrisy of the powerful, the denial of the desire for basic human dignity.   The response was to either embrace the book, as many Americans did, or burn it.

            There was an immense negative response from forces in agribusiness, as well as many California localities who resented the way the state and its businesses were depicted.  The above is a publicity photo of farm worker Clell Pruett flanked by two members of the Associated Farmers, an organization of large landowners, as Pruett is about to burn the book.  Understandably, the forces of industry were unhappy with the book, and photos like the one above were used as part of a not-unsuccessful attempt to convince the public that the novel was insulting to the migrant workers. 

            The fact that The Grapes of Wrath is widely taught in high schools and recognized as one of the definitive “Great American Novels” shows who won in the arena of public opinion.  Zanuck and Ford almost immediately made the now classic film version starring Henry Fonda:

Although it lost the Best Picture Oscar to Hitchcock’s film version of du Maurier’s Rebecca, there’s no question that this remains one of the greatest films, period.

            The Grapes of Wrath has a major thematic similarity to many of the other books on this list so far: a glorification of rural and small town life.  Wang Lung’s farm in The Good Earth, Tara in Gone with the Wind, the farm community in So Big.  Even the novels for which this isn’t the primary focus tend to address a prevailing attitude of reverence towards small towns.  Perhaps because this was a dying way of life.  As industrialization loomed, as small farmers became obsolete, as we entered the age where cars replaced horses, and manufacturing replaced farm work, people needed a connection to a world that was rapidly being replaced, who, like the Joads, had to leave their way of life behind and start again in a new world.  

Also published in 1939:  
Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
Ernest Hemingway - The Snows of Kilimanjaro
James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
Nathaniel West - The Day of the Locust

1925: Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs

Who?

            Arthur Hamilton Gibbs (1888 – 1964) was born in London.  He was the youngest of three brothers who all had successful careers in writing (his brothers were Cosmo Hamilton, whose success was mainly as a playwright, and Sir Philip Hamilton Gibbs, who was knighted in response to his reporting on the first world war).  Arthur served in World War One as an artillery officer in Egypt, France, and Serbia.  In 1919 he married Bostonian attorney Jeanette Phillips, and in 1920 moved permanently to the United States.  He became a naturalized American citizen soon after.

So what's this book about?         
         Soundings tells the story of Nancy Hawthorne, an artist’s daughter from a small town in England as she emerges into adulthood.  Her father, who has raised her to operate outside pointless convention, decides she should spend a year travelling abroad to discover herself.  In France, she befriends an American girl.  When the American girl’s brother and his roommate, Bob, come to visit, she falls in love with Bob. 

            The story is, by and large, pretty melodramatic.  This, among other aspects of the story, really undermines the themes of not shaming sexuality and overthrowing unfair conventions.  It’s this inconsistency that was my biggest problem with Soundings. It seems to revel in the conventions it criticizes. It's stuck half-way between a critique of society and a potboiler romance, but refuses to commit itself to either role.

Why was it so popular?
            Soundings is unconventional enough to be controversial, but inoffensive enough to be popular. It embraces some of the newly popular (at the time) ideas about women’s freedom and sexuality, without letting the characters benefit by it. 

Why haven't I heard of it? 
           The reasons I listed for its popularity above are the same reasons it can’t be popular now.  The ‘new ideas’ have become old ideas.  If the story were more about how society were enforcing these conventions on the protagonist, it may have held up better, but almost everyone she meets is supportive of her and her ideology. 

Should I read it?
          Not unless you really like romance novels.  Even taking into account the inconsistencies in the story's message(s), it is a decent, well-written, romance.  The criticisms of societal conventions are valid, but they are no longer as revolutionary as they once were.  There are certainly worse romance novels out there, but there are better, as well.

Also published in 1925:
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald  
The Trial  - Franz Kafka  
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf  
The Hollow Men - T. S. Eliot

Sources:  

Gibbs, A. Hamilton.  Soundings. Little Brown and Company. 1925. Print.

Kunitz, Stanley.  Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern       Literature. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company. 1942. Print.