![]() ![]() Your basic historical novelist plods along, takes the evidence as given, filling in details when needed, seeking accuracy as well as truth the fun, be the author Anya Seton or John Dos Passos, is to mix the “real” or the “known” with the “imagined” and to end up with a confectionery or acerbic or somberly insistent sense of the way it once was. In the canneries and mills these were the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers or have their hands mangled or their legs crushed they had to be counseled to stay alert.īaron Munchausen might well ask: “Was you there, Doctorow?” Indeed, had the Baron turned up in the pages of Ragtime to ask that question, Doctorow would have been delighted to answer: Yes. They were more agile than adults but they tended in the latter hours of the day to lose a degree of efficiency. If there was a problem about employing children it had to do only with their endurance. Employers liked to think of them as happy elves. They did not complain as adults tended to do. ![]() They were valued everywhere they were employed. ![]() Near the beginning we learn this about America at the turn of the century:Ĭhildren suffered no discriminatory treatment. Washington, the Fire Chief of New Rochelle, the District Attorney of New York. Morgan, Henry Ford, Admiral Peary, Baron Ashkenazy and his daughter, Booker T. Doctorow’s very splashy Ragtime are a family, called by name Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, and “the boy,” plus Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K. ![]()
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