Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr. - Hardcover

Larry Lockridge

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670854409 ISBN 13: 9780670854400

Publisher: Viking, 1994

Synopsis

The son of the author of Raintree County offers a retrospective about his father, who committed suicide at the age of thirty-three, examining his father's motives for his act and considering how it affected his own life. 10,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Larry Lockridge teaches Romantic literature at New York University.

Reviews

Raintree County , a first novel published in 1948 by Houghton Mifflin, was a sensation. It won the $150,000 MGM novel prize, was a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and topped the bestseller lists. Three months after its publication, its 33-year-old author Ross Lockridge Jr. killed himself. His son, who was only five-years-old at his father's death, here brings a new perspective to the tragedy. The family saved everything written to and by Ross Jr., even the novelist's student notes secretly exchanged in high school classrooms. The younger Lockridge thus draws on a wealth of family letters, diaries and, most importantly, on Raintree County itself in depicting his father as a man whose faith in himself as a writer wavered until he could no longer handle the stress of actual publication. The novelist grew up and remained in Indiana; his father Ross Sr. was a local historian, his mother Elsie a strong and supportive presence. Ross Jr.'s wife Vernice bore his four children, typed the more than 2000 manuscript pages of Raintree County and desperately tried to stave off his depression. His son, who teaches Romantic literature at New York University, is a passionate admirer of his father's novel though he struggles valiantly to approach it objectively. One senses that the novelist would be proud of his son: he has created a full portrait of life in the Midwest between the wars and of the collision of depression and the creative mind. It remains to be seen whether this insightful and affectionate biography will bring his father's novel a new audience. Now out of print, Raintree County will be reissued in paperback by Penguin simultaneously with the publication of this biography.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The son of Ross Lockridge, Jr., who committed suicide at 33 following the publication of his inventive, 1066-page novel Raintree County (1948), cuts his father a new suit and redresses an injured great American writer. Few readers know much more about Ross Lockridge, Jr., than was depicted in John Leggett's dual biography (Ross and Tom, 1974) of Lockridge and Thomas Heggan, the author of Mister Roberts (1977), a book about two literary suicides who seemingly could not face vast success. Leggett's Lockridge, a motormouth egomaniac, we now see was under-researched and as far off as a funhouse mirror. Larry Lockridge here faces the double task of writing a biography of his father and of finding out what drove him to a ruthless act of self- destruction. In doing this, he has produced what amounts to a major work on depression: a superb analytic description of clinical depression as it was understood vaguely in 1948 and more fully today. At the same time, he describes a great American tragedy, the story of a midwestern hero of great gifts who inherits the spirit of Whitman but comes to grief against a stone wall of materialism built by Houghton Mifflin, MGM, and the Book of the Month Club, to shrink the hero's great work down to salability. The hero's tragic flaw is ``competitiveness.'' Known as ``A-plus Lockridge'' because of his unrivaled scholarly achievements, a master of many languages, a writer possessed of photographic memory who could type 100 words a minute, an athlete who married the most beautiful and intelligent woman he'd ever met, Lockridge set out to surpass Joyce, Wolfe, Melville, and Hemingway only to pull his country's commercial monoliths down on his head, with MGM then erecting a terrible movie as his marker. An immensely moving book, deserving of the Pulitzer Prize that went to James Gould Cozzens's dreary Guard of Honor in 1948. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Now remembered as a best seller that was often denounced for its bold sexuality, Raintree County was the life work of Indiana author Ross Lockridge Jr., who killed himself shortly after its publication in 1948. His son, Larry (English, New York Univ.), has written the first full-length study of the man, his roots, and the genesis of his work, to be published in conjunction with a paperback reissue of Raintree County (Penguin.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Raintree County is an ambitious, imposing, flashback-filled novel set in 1890s Indiana, published in 1948. Even as it rose atop the sales lists, its tormented author snuffed out his life with carbon monoxide--a shock or shame or empty puzzlement against which "survivors" can never inoculate themselves. But now one of Ross Lockridge's sons, an English professor, sensitively explores the novelist's 33-year-long life with such assurance and detachment that his personal motivations--his feelings as a son--are nearly undetectable. Larry Lockridge brings his family's genealogy vividly to life both as a source for the novel's characters and as a proud archetype of America's vanished small-town era. Lockridge Senior, for example, was something of a patriotic huckster of Hoosier history, delivering speeches all over the state, and the family's literary tradition flowered in Lockridge Junior, a brilliant student at Indiana University. While intermittently teaching, he and his wife, Vernice, slaved over his epic, at last submitting it over the transom to Houghton Mifflin. What followed--acrimony over editing, movie money, and some slam reviews--somehow fed into Lockridge's fatal depression. His son's excellent exposition is partly an honest, devotional salute to his father, but it is also an insightful look into the creation of Raintree County, now being reissued by Penguin . Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670854409
• ISBN 13: 9780670854400
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 500