My interest in blending historical and fictional characters in a novel came with the reading of E.L. Doctorow's 1975 book Ragtime. In that panoramic story, which covered the first two decades of the 20th Century, Doctorow weaved a cornucopia of real people through his colorful tale.

Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, and famed architect Stanford White are among…