Based on the 1975 novel by E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime tells the story of a Harlem musician named Coalhouse Walker Jr; a woman known only as Mother, who is the matriarch of a white upper-class family in New Rochelle, New York; and Tateh, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe. Their stories weave together as a tapestry of the American experience in the early 20th Century.