Terrence Samuels says Ragtime -- an innovative tableau of real and fictional events in the early 20th century -- legitimized the idea that the self-interested act can have an impact.
Even the mundane: In 1978, I moved into an apartment in the Bronx where we were forced to temporarily suspend conversation every few minutes when subway trains went by on the elevated Pelham Bay line just outside the bedroom windows. In Ragtime, Doctorow describes turn-of-the century tenements full of immigrants with exactly the same noise problem.
