My Dad, Ross Lockeridge, Jr., and “Raintree County”

Ross Lockridge, Jr.

Not long ago, someone stopped to see me asked me something I had not been asked in a very long time. This individual explained that the book club she belonged to decided that all the members should ask someone who was not in the club what was the favorite book they ever read and she decided to ask me.

You might expect that – having had a grandmother who founded the public library in Grayslake, Illinois, a father who was a poet and English professor, and who has sold books for almost 30 years – I would equivocate. Perhaps, I would give four or five book titles that I really loved. In reality, I didn’t hesitate in my response: the answer is, and always has been, Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr.

I realize there are only a handful of you out there who know, or at least have heard of this book. It has fallen into obscurity and, despite the efforts of several publishers to re-introduce it to American readers, it remains largely forgotten.

Lockridge published the book with Houghton-Mifflin in early 1948 to tremendous critical acclaim. It was chosen as a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, when that distinction was a tremendous honor, and – despite its massive 1,060-page size – it became an instant bestseller. Less than three months after Raintree’s publication, Lockridge committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He was 33 years old and left behind a wife and four children.

I mistakenly told my questioner that Raintree County was currently out-of-print. In fact, Chicago Review Press re-issued the book in 2009 as part of the “Rediscovered Classics” series. In the preface to this most recent edition, titled Raintree County Sixty Years Later: A Remembrance, the novelist Herman Wouk writes: “Once long ago when I reread Raintree County, I had a momentary impulse to write a literary critique, something I never do, to be called ‘He Came, and Ye Knew Him Not.’ By him I meant the author of ‘the great American novel’.”

Whether Raintree is the “great American novel” has been debated by a host of critics – but the very fact that it has engendered so much debate seems to validate that it is, indeed, the great American novel.

My discovery of Raintree came about in the late 1970s. Indeed, the book made such an impression that I wrote a rather lengthy piece about it for Chan Harris’s Door County Advocate in the June 12, 1980, issue. Here is how I told the story 33 years ago (when I was 22 years old for those who are counting):

Late one spring night, before I was to begin the intimidating challenge of college in the fall, I lay upon my bed watching a golden-oldie movie entitled Raintree County, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. My father stopped in near the end of the flick to say good night and, upon discovering the title of the film, his eyes flashed with a mystical gleam and he remained on the edge of my bed watching until the end.

Only at the conclusion did he mention a book and a forgotten author named Ross Lockridge, Jr. He recommended the book to me in the most flattering terms and then retired for the night, his eyes still lit with that intriguing gleam.

I was younger then and whether it was because I was a rebellious youth, or that I was engrossed in the realm of Tolkien and fantasy, I did not immediately pick up on his recommendation. My father, however, can be a subtly persuasive man. The very next morning he greeted me at the breakfast table with a thick green tome tucked snuggly under one arm – Raintree, of course. He departed for work that day with the book still tightly in tow.

For the next four days he read Raintree – indeed he never seemed to stop reading until the last page. Those four days were hell for me. Entering the study I would find him reposed in his chair with a face that radiated enjoyment and wonder. Passing the door to his room late at night I’d catch a glimpse of him propped up in bed with a smile that I consciously thought was stupid, yet unconsciously coveted. By the time he finished the book I was hooked. I grabbed the book from his desk, retired to the sanctum of my room, opened to the first page, and went looking for “stupid smiles.”

I found them and kept on finding them for the next two and a half months. I carried the book with me to Door County that summer, reading whenever I got the chance – either late at night or when I was “babysitting the hotel” behind the desk at the Anderson [Hotel]. For two and a half months I read, not because I was a slow reader, but because Raintree was like a good German meal: meant to be devoured slowly with every sense drinking deeply of the thick, rich flavor.

Lockridge masterfully managed to combine history and literature, a skill that led to the first profound influence the book was to have on my life. When I entered college that fall it became immediately apparent to all who knew me that the emphasis of my interest had shifted. No longer were science and math the be all and end all of my life. I enrolled in one history course and one literature course and by my second term I was taking two history courses and creative writing. By the close of my freshman year I was a confirmed history major [I would later add English composition as a second major].

It might surprise you to learn that, even though I have five different copies of the book on my shelves at home, I have only read Raintree that one time. In part this is the result of so much I want to read, but there is another factor that is more important.

Just the other day my editor, Jim Lundstrom, and I were talking about how a reader can be influenced by where they are at any given time in their own life. This is particularly true of fiction and poetry. I can’t begin to tell you the number of times that I have picked up a book and then set it aside, only to pick it up at some future point and be completely enamored.

Raintree County came at just the right time of my life and, as Chan Harris stated in his headline to the story I quoted from above, it literally changed my life. So will I re-read it? Absolutely. I am just waiting to know when the time is right.