Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Larry Lockridge
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Edition: Centennial Edition
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 3.40cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 1.012kg
ISBN: 9780253012814
ISBN 10: 0253012813
Pages: 536
Publication Date: 17 April 2014
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
""Larry Lockridge has written a moving account of his father's life, wonderfully evocative of Bloomington in the years before World War II. Ross Lockridge, Jr. ranks as one of the finest literary talents ever to come out of Indiana."" - Lee H. Hamilton, former US Representative from Indiana ""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 ""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
Larry Lockridge has written what in my faith we call a Kaddish, for his father and for his mother too, beautiful and memorable. --Herman Wouk--Herman Wouk
Author Information
Larry Lockridge is Professor of English at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is author of Coleridge the Moralist, The Ethics of Romanticism, and essays on biography and British Romantic literature. For Shade of the Raintree he received the MidAmerica Award, given by the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.
