The family business is the manufacture of flags and fireworks, an easy source of wealth due to the national enthusiasm for patriotic displays.

Father joins Robert Peary's expedition to the North Pole, and his return sees a change in his relationship with his wife, who has experienced independence in his absence.

A professional musician, well-dressed and well-spoken, he gains the family's respect and overcomes their prejudice initially by playing ragtime music on their piano.

Having exhausted legal resources, Coalhouse begins killing firemen and bombing firehouses to force the city to meet his demands: that his Model T be restored to its original condition and Conklin be turned over to him for justice.

Interwoven with this story is a depiction of life in the tenement slums of New York city, focused on an Eastern European immigrant referred to as Tateh, who struggles to support himself and his daughter after driving her mother off for accepting money for sex with her employer.

The novel is unusual for the irreverent way that historical figures and fictional characters are woven into the narrative, making for surprising connections and linking different events and trains of thought about fame and success, on the one hand, and poverty and racism on the other.

Arch-capitalist financier J. P. Morgan, pursuing his complex delusions of grandeur, becomes obsessed with reincarnation and Egyptian mysticism, and finds an unexpected kindred spirit in the down-to-earth Henry Ford.

Other historical characters mentioned include Two real-life New York City officials also appear in the book: Manhattan District Attorney Charles S. Whitman and Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo.

[4] The 1991 Fredric Jameson book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism considers Doctorow's Ragtime to illustrate the crisis of historiography and a resistance to interpretation.