It would be a severe understatement to tritely say that the sixties and seventies in the United States were a time of social change. Rather, in all appropriateness, it would be far more relevant to state that these decades were the pivotal point of sociological, economical, and moral change in the doctrines that had seemingly held America together until this point in history. In his novel "Ragtime", E.L. Doctorow includes in his style a subtle inseam which signals to the often described as tumultuous periods these decades were. Any piece of literature associated with a distinct time period has the tendency to propose notions from the current era it is being written in. While the reader can draw many parallels from details in Doctorow's work to the aforementioned decades, it is most imperative that one realizes the magnitude time periods where such events are taking place can have on an author. These are the things of soulful writing, the burning flavors that melt to create the dishes of thought a reader can apply to the deep reflection on how the events of life are reactionary to one another and how they bring us to where we stand today.
             If one were to begin to look for early signs of parallelism in the novel, they need not even open to the first page. The title "Ragtime" is given to the prevalent style of music in the 1920's which began to sweep through popular music at the outset of what soon became the Jazz Age is American culture. This trend in music foreshadowed far greater events in American culture though. Seen almost as a counter-culture in some part of the country to traditional music forms of entertainment, it entered African Americans into a broad spectrum of art forms and mainstreamed music that would have otherwise been neglected for its origin. The nineteen sixties' and seventies' were filled with what at the time seemed to be an overpowering number of groups and types of music that were exploding onto the pop music ...