Shade of the Raintree: 2the Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, JR.

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. (Apr.)