How long does it take to read Ragtime?
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow takes about 4 hours 57 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 57 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1974. 270 pages, about 74,250 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 15 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 57 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 6 minutes |
The page count is the median across 25 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line between fantasy & historical fact, between real & imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud & Emiliano Zapata slip in & out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family & other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler & a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
Subjects: Fiction, History, Race relations, African American families, Jewish families, Einwanderer
