Title: Shade of the Raintree
Description: Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s novel, Raintree County, was the publishing event of 1948. Excerpted in Life magazine, the novel was the Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, winner of the enormous MGM Novel Award, and first on the nation's bestseller lists. Many years later, Larry Swindell, the syndicated critic, would write that "no myth is more imposing than the Great American Novel; but if it is truly unattainable, I believe that Ross Lockridge made closer approach than any other writer has, before or since." It was Lockridge's first novel and his last. Two months after its publication, the thirty-three-year-old author from Indiana took his own life, leaving a wife and four children. His son Larry was five years old at the time.

Shade of the Raintree is a son's search for an understanding of his father's baffling act. It is also the moving story of what it is like to grow up in the wake of a family tragedy, and to grow up with a novel instead of a father.

In this powerfully narrated biography, Larry Lockridge uncovers a life of great vitality, humor, love, and visionary ambition - but also of deep vulnerability. Ross Lockridge embodied so many of a writer's aspirations and fates - from the sudden vision of a work that might answer to ambition, to the all-consuming act of composition over months and years, to the dislocations of sudden fame and wealth, to the question that dogs every writer, What next? This is a story of the pride and generosity that attend the act of writing, and the terrible depletion that often follows.

Shade of the Raintree is extraordinary in the way its author manages to combine a son's emotional investments with a sleuth's dispassionate inquiry. The result is an exhilarating, revelatory narrative of a life that was, in some ways, an allegory of the American writer. Raintree County is being republished by Penguin Books simultaneously with Shade of the Raintree. Even for those who have never read the novel, this biography offers a remarkable portrait of how artists may put themselves at risk in creating worlds of wonder and humanity.
Subjects: American Novelists, Biography, Lockridge, ross franklin, 1914-1948, Authors, biography, Authors, american
People: Ross Lockridge (1914-1948)
Time periods: 20th century