Shade of the Raintree

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 t