After his divorce in 1906, Joplin spent the next several months traveling. He visited many of his old stomping grounds—St. Louis, Chicago, and Texarkana. Then, around July 1907, he settled in New York and began serious musical activities again, performing frequently and composing energetically in the various hotels and rooming houses at which he stayed. He sought out a publisher for some of those new compositions, and the Jos. W. Stern Company, which had published works by several other African American composers, bought two of Joplin's rags in short order. One of these was the Gladiolus Rag, copyrighted on September 24, 1907.

The piece looks back in many ways to Joplin's Leola (1905), with which it shares some ideas, and beyond that to Joplin's first great success, the Maple Leaf Rag (1899). But a new maturity is in evidence. The new rag is more adventurous harmonically than its predecessors; it is among the first of several later Joplin pieces to show a distinctly Chopinesque lyricism; and its final strain is a particularly grand one that looks forward to the active left-hand parts of Joplin's last rags. The "Gladiolus" is among Joplin's best-known pieces.

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