In 1908, Scott Joplin published a short book of studies to teach the style of ragtime to amateur pianists. These were to aid them, he stated, "in giving the 'Joplin Rags' that weird and intoxicating effect intended by the composer." Joplin fought throughout his lifetime to convince the musical world that the ragtime music he wrote was on a level with the great classical works of the European tradition. He even used this style to write in that most European of forms, opera. But while he succeeded in the popular market with his piano works, he never received the recognition he so richly deserved.

Joplin was the son of a former slave, and grew up in a musical family. He received some formal training, and at an early age was playing and teaching locally. He soon left home to begin life as a traveling musician along the Mississippi. In 1893 he was in Chicago, where he led a band at the World's Columbian Exhibition. By 1896 he had published a few songs and piano pieces. Around this time he settled in Sedalia, Missouri, though he often traveled. In Sedalia he studied at George R. Smith College, a small school founded for the education of African-Americans. He supported himself by teaching, and playing piano and cornet. One of the places he often played was the Maple Leaf Club (from which his most famous piece derived its name). It was also in Sedalia that Joplin met the publisher John Stark, who published about a third of his music.

In 1899, Joplin published his first rags (one of which was the "Maple Leaf Rag"). With the help of a lawyer he managed to work out a royalty arrangement (unusual for the time) that turned out to be profitable. In 1901, he moved to St. Louis, where he founded the Scott Joplin Opera Company in an attempt to produce operatic works based on the "syncopated style." By 1907 he settled in New York (it has been held that he traveled to Europe in the intervening years, but no evidence exists to confirm this). While continuing to publish his ragtime pieces, he also finished his major work, the opera Treemonisha. He published the work in 1911 (and the score received a favorable review), but he was never able to get more than portions of it performed. Early in 1917, Joplin suffered a mental collapse, and he destroyed a number of his unpublished pieces. He was committed to an asylum and died a short time later.

Joplin's music soon fell out of style with the development of the newer styles of jazz. It began to receive more notice in the 1940s, but it really entered into the public's consciousness in the 1970s when Joshua Rifkin (a classically-trained pianist and musicologist) made a very successful recording of a number of Joplin's works. It reached an even larger audience as music for the popular film The Sting. In 1972, Treemonisha was successfully produced, and in 1976 he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Today, Joplin's music has finally taken its well-deserved place among the great works of American Music.