Playing with Helpless Dead Puppets

E.L. Doctorow's best-known novel, Ragtime, was published 50 years ago this month .

Set in New York at the dawn of the 20th century , the novel is set in a world in which industrial tycoons and Jewish émigrés rub shoulders with magicians and murderers.

At the centre of this whirligig is the “family” a conventional upper-class brood of unnamed individuals loosely based on Doctorow ’s relatives.

Doctorow is gesturing towards fiction’s capacity to imagine the day-to-day lives of historical figures.

We see Morgan , that “monarch of the invisible, transnational kingdom of capital” meeting Henry Ford to discuss esoteric theories of magic.

Harry Houdini is derailed by the eerie appearance of Harry K. Thaw , incarcerated for killing the architect Stanford White in a dispute over their shared lover, Evelyn Nesbitt .