Both E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and Don DeLillo’s Libra are masters of spinning history into tapestries of fiction. Both novels take real events and real people, but cleverly slip fictional details in to craft their own narrative. They share this core method, but they use it for completely different purposes. Ragtime builds a huge, connected story of a whole time period, while Libra takes apart a tragic event until it feels like it has no solid truth at all. These books both treat history like their own sandbox. For example, Doctorow puts his fictional family in the same room with famous figures like Harry Houdini and J.P. Morgan almost casually. Some parts of the story are real, like Peary’s expedition to the north pole. However, some aren't, like how Father came along and brought the flag in the iconic photo. Delillo, on the other hand, retells backstories of real characters and his fictional characters to “manipulate” real life characters to create his narrative. In Ragtime, Doctor...