E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime is a sprawling fictional account of American manners and mores in the years between 1900 and 1913. Among the mosaic of colorful factual and fictional characters in the novel were escape artist Harry Houdini and radical Emma Goldman.  The Tony Award-winning musical is the story of an immigrant artist who becomes a movie director; the saga of "Gibson Girl" Evelyn Nesbit Shaw, for whose sake playboy Harry K. Thaw; kills architect Stanford White and a lone black man's quest for justice when his car is destroyed by a racist fire chief.