Ragtime play hardcopy10/7/2023 ![]() According to Broadway World, the 1998 Broadway adaptation of Ragtime grossed close to $80 million during its two year run. Both feature very specific imagery of significant others receiving a blow to the chest from a weapon (and, as the Observer points out with its citations, the passages from both narratives are quite similar).īut let us inform our good thief Edgar why the sources do matter. Doctorow’s Booker Washington fills in for Kleist’s Martin Luther. Both feature the horse and the car returned in perfect condition. Both figures seek a vigilante form of justice, enlisting men to their eventual deaths when denied proper recourse. Doctorow had ripped off many key elements of “Kohlhaas.” Both Kohlhaas and Coalhouse are stopped by men who demand toll. You know, writers lift things from other writers all the time.” That same year, Doctorow would offer an altogether different defense to Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua: “somewhere along the line as I was writing Ragtime I realized I was writing chronicle-fiction with a certain mocking or ironic tone but nevertheless with the same distance with the characters that you find in chronicle-fiction, that is to say, a distance not as great as a historian, not as close as the post-Flaubertian novelist, but somewhere in the middle and maybe that’s why I remembered that I’d always wanted to use ‘Michael Kohlhass’ in some way, it was a story for me.” But by 1997, Doctorow (sounding more like Cory than Edgar) said to Michael Silverblatt, “The source of what you use finally doesn’t matter….The sources don’t matter as much as the act of composing.”Īs The New York Observer noted on March 23, 1998, there was clearly more going on than composing. Yet four years later, in a Yale Vernacular interview with Liesl Schillinger, Doctorow downplayed “reworking the circumstances” to being “very much inspired by Kleist.” And in a 1988 interview with Herwig Friedl and Dieter Schulz, Doctorow would identify his theft as “a quite deliberate hommage. So there it was - I’d finally found the use for that legend I’d hoped to find - but not until the moment I needed it. I felt the premise was obviously relevant, appropriate - the idea of a man who cannot find justice from a society that claims to be just. I had always wanted to rework the circumstances of Kleist’s story. But that car: What would happen to that lovely car of his is what happened to Michael Kohlhaas’s horses. I knew Sarah would forgive him and they would be reconciled. Then I began to think about the implications of a black man owning his own car in the early 1900’s. And that’s how I found the central image of the book. He starts to court Sarah and when she refuses to see him, he plays the piano for the family in their parlor. ![]() ![]() He came along in his shining Ford, an older man, and he said, “I’m looking for a young woman of color.” Where had he been? I decided he was a musician, a man who lived on the road, going where he found work. I had introduced Houdini driving up Broadview Avenue. Obviously, she would have tried to kill the child only from overwhelming despair or sense of betrayal. There was Sarah coming to live in the house with this baby. Suddenly there was Mother discovering the little brown newborn in the flower bed. I found myself using it in Ragtime, where I never knew in advance what was going to happen. I knew when I heard this I’d use it someday. Several years ago my wife related a true story she’d heard about a housemaid in our neighborhood who bore a child and then buried it in a garden. His novella ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ was very much in my mind when I found the black man Coalhouse Walker, driving up the hill in his Ford.” In 1983, Doctorow was somewhat more honest about his carjacking with the notably sharper Larry McCaffery: In a 1978 interview with Jared Lubarsky, Doctorow declared, “I realized as I went along that the model for this book, in terms of its narrative distance, was the chronicle fiction of the German master Heinrich von Kleist. Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’ is a highly original experiment in historical fiction.” Unfortunately, because Lehmann-Haupt possessed middling erudition, he could not ken that Doctorow had, in fact, ripped off Heinrich von Kleist for his novel’s most memorable character. In 1975, the New York Times‘s Christopher Lehmann-Haupt initiated his review with this typically hyperbolic sentence: “E. (This is the fifteenth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Pat Robertson, Evil and Hateful Demagogue, Finally Drops Dead.How a Pathetic Cleveland Hipster Named Dan McLaughlin Got Me Banned on TikTok.The Laughter in Light/Crutches and Spice/mdg650hawk TikTok Drama Explained.
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