ABSTRACT
But in retrospect, I suppose (speaking of Ragtime and The Book of Daniel) there is some kind of disposition – and no more than that – to propose that all our radicals (and we’ve had an astonishing number of them) and our labor leaders and our Wobblies and our anarchists and so on, have really been intimate members of the family – black sheep, as it were, whom no one likes to talk about. And I suppose one could make a case for my disposition to suggest that they are indeed related, that they are part of the family, and that they’ve had an important effect on the rest of us. (EC, pp. 67–8)
