Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., Author of Raintree County by Larry Lockridge (review)

Larry Lockridge describes the purpose of his biography of his father, first published in 1994 and now reprinted on the centenary of Ross Lockridge’s birth, as “in part forensic” (xvii). He assigns himself two briefs. The first is to enlarge and complicate the idea of his father commonly held by people who know him principally as a writer who committed suicide shortly after the publication of his hugely ambitious, thousand page-plus bestselling novel of 1948. The second is to put that novel, Raintree County, “back on the literary map,” to move it from the fringe to within the boundary of the American literary canon (xvii).

Ross Lockridge, Jr. grew up in a household steeped in Indiana history. His father Ross Lockridge, Sr. was a kind of evangelist public historian who travelled the state delivering readings and organizing pageants that celebrated people and events. His mother, Elsie Shockley Lockridge, told stories and preserved documents relating to her family’s history in Henry County, whose landscape provided the template for Raintree County. The Lockridges lived in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne before moving to Bloomington in 1921. Ross attended public schools, starting with a one-room country school, and enjoyed a boyhood and adolescence which in his son’s warm and evocative account holds the charm of an album of family photographs or an old high-school yearbook. He excelled in his studies (he was known as “A+ Lockridge”), won a state contest in stenography and typing, ran cross-country, acted in a play, played in the orchestra, was elected president of his junior class, went to Boy Scout camp and a Methodist summer camp, went to the circus and with girls or friends to movies, dances, picnics, roller-skating, swimming, on hay rides and “coke dates.” “They had a vitality as well as a relative innocence,” Larry Lockridge writes, “that justifies some nostalgia here” (84).

By the time he entered Indiana University in 1931, Ross Lockridge was on his way to becoming, in his son’s words (and emphasis), an American writer (40). He wrote with prodigious facility. When he spent his junior year in college (1933–34) studying in France on a scholarship, his letters home totaled 148,000 words. After graduating in 1935 with the highest undergraduate average in the history of the university, he enrolled in a master’s program and completed a 250-page master’s thesis on Byron and Napoleon. In one week in 1937 he wrote 1,300 lines of blank verse for a pageant celebrating the founding of the New Harmony settlement. In five weeks in 1940, at his father’s commission, he wrote a history of the family of Benjamin Harrison. That same year he won a graduate fellowship at Harvard, where he planned to write a dissertation on Whitman. But he took a job at Simmons in Boston to provide for his family—he married Vernice Baker, a high-school classmate, in 1937 and by 1942 they had two children—and to give most of his time to the writing of The Dream of the Flesh of Iron, a four hundred page poem dramatizing the decline of the culture and consciousness of America and Europe after the First World War. Larry Lockridge, who has presumably read the poem, calls it “unreadable,” and when the manuscript was rejected by Houghton-Mifflin, Ross Lock-ridge came down to earth and close to home in a manuscript titled American Lives, presumably an episodic fiction based on the histories of some members of his mother’s family. When that scheme broke down, he turned over the two thousand pages of the manuscript and started to write Raintree County on their backs.

Larry Lockridge’s smart and illuminating reading of his father’s novel makes a very good case for its candidacy as a canonical text. He places the book...