What does one seek for in life? Success would be the answer to that question for most people, but what exactly is success? The definition of success can be based on money, beauty, love, but one thing everyone can agree on is with success comes happiness. In the novel Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow introduces you to a woman named Evelyn Nesbit, as she struggles to find her own happiness. Evelyn seeks that one thing that will mark her success; she will travel through her life trying to find a meaning and purpose. That is truly what makes people happy, a place to belong, and a purpose to fulfill. Doctorow shows the reader Evelyn's path to success, to find that sometimes success is not what you believe it to be.
             "She had agreed to testify in his behalf for the sum of two hundred thousand dollars. And her price for a divorce was going to be even higher."(23) Evelyn would dream of the popular belief that money would cure all her problems. It would bring her into the society she never thought she could enter. If she had to use her body to get to this stature, that is just what she had to do. At first, she was very successful at what she did. She married an extremely wealthy man with this tactic, she was a success story. Even if she did not love her husband or the life they shared together she would never have to worry about financial needs again. She was on her way to finding that happiness that comes when you feel success. "With her own mother, whose greediest dreams of connived wealth she had surpassed"(19), it is no wonder Evelyn used her body to become wealthy, that is what she had been thought by her mother. She had it set in her mind that this is what she was supposed to do. That is how her mother got by. "A strange bitter exaltation suffused her, a cold victory grin of the heart. She had grown up playing in the streets of a Pennsylvania coal town"(23). Evelyn went from the little girl from Pennsylvania
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