“E. L. Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’ is a highly original experiment in historical fiction. But the first thing to be said about it is that it works. It works so well that one devours it in a single sitting as if it were the most conventional of entertainments. And the reviewer is tempted to dispense with heavy breathing and analysis and settle down to mindless celebration of the pure fun of the thing. Of the passages in which one Harry Houdini, grown dissatisfied with being ‘a trickster, an illusionist, a mere magician,’ sails to Europe, learns to fly a biplane and performs a few turns before the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who ‘gazed. . .with stupid heavy-lidded eyes’ and ‘didn’t seem to know who Houdini was. He congratulated him on the invention of the airplane.’ Or of the scene in which a J. P. Morgan and a Henry Ford get together in a mansion on New York’s West 36th Street, exchange their respective thoughts on reincarnation and ‘found the most secret and exclusive club in America, The Pyramid, of which they were the only members.'”

Read the rest of the 1975 review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times.