indiana university press
Shade of the Raintree
The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of Raintree County Centennial Edition
Centennial Edition
Larry Lockridge Raintree County, the first novel by Ross Lockridge, Jr., was the publishing event of 1948. Excerpted in Life magazine, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, won MGM’s Novel Award and a movie deal, and stood at the top of the nation’s bestseller lists. Unfortunately, Lockridge’s first novel was also his last. Two months after its publication the 33-year-old author from Bloomington, Indiana, took his own life. His son Larry was five years old at the time. Shade of the Raintree is Larry’s search for an understanding of his father’s baffling act. In this powerfully narrated biography, Larry Lockridge uncovers a man of great vitality, humor, love, and visionary ambition, but also of deep vulnerability. The author manages to combine a son’s emotional investments with a sleuth’s dispassionate inquiry. The result is an exhilarating, revelatory narrative of an American writer’s life. With a new preface by the author, this 2014 paperback edition marks 100 years since the birth of Ross Lockridge, Jr. Larry Lockridge is Professor of English at New York University. He is author of The Ethics of Romanticism and editor (with John Maynard and Donald Stone) of Nineteenth-Century Lives.
“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.” —Publishers Weekly
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Shade of the R a intR ee the Life and death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of Raintree County L a R Ry L ock R idge
“No disappeared father has been more honored by a son’s inquiry than is Ross Lockridge, Jr., by his son Larry’s utterly engaging biography. The son’s gaze is forthright, sparing nothing, accepting and reconciling all, and bringing to this absorbing history the same ancestral powers of narration that distinguished his dazzling, lost father. Larry Lockridge has given his father something that long-vanished man had lost faith in: solidity and value.” —Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List
March 2014 Biography World 520 pages, 40 b&w illus., 6 x 9 Paper 978-0-253-01281-4 $25.00t £18.99 eBook 978-0-253-01298-2 $21.99t £16.99
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