Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr.

by Larry Lockridge

In 1948, Ross Lockridge's novel Raintree County was a number one bestseller and acclaimed literary work. Yet, at the height of his fame at age 33, Lockridge killed himself. In a brilliant biography, his son Larry seeks understanding. Simultaneous release with the re-publication by Penguin of the long unavailable Raintree County.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

528 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

About the author

Larry Lockridge is a writer living in New York City. Professor Emeritus of English, New York University, and a Guggenheim Fellow, he is best known for the prizewinning biography of his father, "Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., Author of Raintree County." He is publishing four standalone yet interrelated novels, "The Enigma Quartet," with Iguana Books, Toronto--"The Cardiff Giant," "The Great Cyprus Think Tank," "Out of Wedlock," and "The Woman in Green" (2021-23).

Reviews

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful, compelling story of a writer who committed suicide two months after the blockbuster novel he'd slaved over for seven years was published---and only days before the book was announced as No. 1 on the bestseller lists. That this bio comes from the author's second oldest son---only five at the time of his father's death in 1948---makes the story more profound. In fact, what makes the life of Ross Lockridge so readable is the son's search for his lost father and the decades-long grieving process that he obviously underwent. It's refreshing to read a child's memory of a dead parent that isn't full of filial anger and rage---Lockridge makes an effort to empathize with all of the characters here, especially his mother, b. 1914, who was still living at the time the book was originally published in 1994. This is certainly a WAYYYY better book than ROSS AND TOM, the 1973 bio that drew parallels between RLJ and Tom Hegget, the author of MISTER ROBERTS, who also died young in the thick of literary success (though under very different circumstances).

Two sections of the book deserve special mention. The first is the author's careful reading of RAINTREE COUNTY, his father's 1000 page opus. Anybody attempting to get into this whopper (as I plan to this spring) needs these chapters as a blueprint to not get lost in the whirlpool of characters and symbols.

Even more important are the questions of suicide and the tendency to glamorize the artistic process. It's refreshing here, despite the frequent use of Freud to explain RLJ's struggles, that no single answer is provided. His publishers did not kill him. Heredity did not kill him. Art did not crucify him. Interestingly, LL explores a theme that I think all writers need to be wary of---the grandiosity of creating art. There are no more painful parts of this book than RLJ's verbose letters to his editors and publishers who were trying to trim RC from 1946-8 to make it more readable. The ego unleashed in those pages is embarrassing---as LL fully admits. (They're also the reason, he suggests, that Tom Leggett is so negative toward his father in ROSS AND TOM). But LL wonders whether this grandiosity (he scrupulously avoids using the word "manic") isn't a pitfall any artist must avoid in having the simple audacity to try to write. It's a worthwhile question given the self-absorption and self-importance that so many authors seem to exude. In a curious way, this book becomes a reassessment of Romantic theories of genius that LL, a Romantic scholar, has no doubt spent a lifetime studying.

I have to admit to having gotten a little RLJ obsessed this past month. This book has a lot to do with it. Even if some of the stretches of family history aren't so compelling, and the apprentice years are overly long, the story of one man's crack-up is handled so wisely that one doesn't feel the wear of 500 pages.

A sidenote: one senses some controversy unacknowledged in the book. The website of LL's older brother, Ernest (also a novelist), reprints some correspondence to LL that takes issue with some of the themes of this bio and suggests a bit of sibling rivalry that boils down to a single verb: "wrotten," which, in describing the books EL has written over his career, is interpreted as a pun on "rotten." Go HERE. The exchange (only EL's side, anyway) in no way undermines SHADE; it's simply an interesting sidenote.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since Carlos Baker felt compelled to tell us Hemingway’s first word and the age at which he was out of diapers, I have avoided biographies of more than about 400 pages. I made an exception for Shade of the Raintree for several reasons and was well rewarded.

The author, Larry Lockridge, is the son of the man who wrote that Great American Novel Raintree County … and then killed himself. The younger Lockridge admits to looking for answers to his father’s death and for that matter to the person of his father, for he was quite young the night Ross Lockridge sat in his car in the closed-up garage and quietly breathed in carbon monoxide until the end. The result is not maudlin, sentimental, or defensive, nor does the biography claim all the answers to the father’s issues and attitudes. It is an exploration of the county, the people, and the times that Ross Lockridge created and the various realities that inspired it.

When I was rather young – ten perhaps – and bored with the books that were suitable, I scrabbled through my mother’s bookshelves. Among the inappropriate titles was Raintree County, and I was thoroughly enchanted. I even liked the movie! Somewhere I heard of Lockridge’s suicide and thought it very sad and disheartening and of course wondered why.

Decades later I read the book again, all 1000+ pages, and did find some serious flaws. But I still loved it. Coming across Shade of the Raintree I knew I had to read it. Glad I am that I did. I may even get out the 1948 Book of the Month Club edition of Raintree County that my mother bought when I was even younger than Larry Lockridge was the night his father died.

[Frederick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this when it came out in 1994. It is a son's biography of his father, a man he barely got to know. His father, Ross Lockridge, Jr., who had written RAINTREE COUNTY, an epic novel spanning the lives of several Civil War soldiers from Indiana, took his own life the day his book reached number one on THE NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list.
I have reviewed RAINTREE COUNTY on my Goodreads page. Briefly, it is a book which took seven years for its author to complete. He tailored it to the publisher's needs, tailored it again, before it was published, for the Book-of-the-Month Club and again, before publication, for M-G-M, the Hollywood studio which had bought the rights.
Laurence Lockridge focuses on his father's achievement and corrects some errors found in earlier accounts of his father's life. This book is also the story of a family dealing with a suicide.
It is a moving account of a lost father. It is not morose or self-pitying, although it is very sad.

[Worth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of Raintree County. Read it when I was a young, saw the movie (arrrgggghhhh, although Montgomery Clift was perfect as Johnny Shawnessy), and have never forgotten it. Urged people to read it over the years. It the deepest underground classic I can think of, and well deserving of the title Great American Novel, right up there with Twain and his Huck. Was so pleased to find a book about the man.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most intimate, insightful, amusing, and heartbreaking book on an author I've ever read.

[Annieonapage · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Raintree County when I was very young, probably because I'd gone to see the movie and I was (and am) a voracious reader. I loved the movie until I read the book and then all changed. Raintree County IS the Great American Novel. It has all the ingredients. It sprawls, it's stuffed with fascinating characters, it covers a time in US history that is definitive (and is being revisited now with our increasing polarity), its central character searching for the raintree: perfect love, a perfect time, a perfect place, perfect peace, magic, answers. It's poetic. It's so American... where else could any of this take place?

I talked about this book for years, but once the movie faded from the public mind, what was recalled of the book went with it. So to find a biography of the man who wrote it, a story I hadn't known, told by a son who knew him only a little bit better, was like finding Johnny's golden raintree.

I still search for my own.

[Christine Sinclair · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting follow up to my reading of Raintree County, which I really liked. It's an in-depth biography of the author by his son, who was only five at the time of his father's suicide. It's very well-written and gives great insight into this tragedy.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can you trust a biography written by its subject's son?

Turns out, "Shade of the Raintree" brings the best of both worlds: scholarly personal history and analysis, and the intimate sources and insights only a member of the family could provide.

So, yes, this biography of the author of "Raintree County" is strong, and recommended reading for anyone who loved that novel, which is one of my favorites.

Larry Lockridge was only 5 years old when his father, Ross Lockridge, Jr., committed suicide just weeks after his only novel was published to great acclaim, earned best-seller status and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection — and months after first winning the MGM book-to-movie prize ($150,000! In 1948!).

Why would an author who'd toiled for much of the 1940s on his epic kill himself after seemingly attaining his heart's desire? Larry Lockridge, of course, knew some of the answers when he tackled this project as an English professor in the 1990s, but "Shade of the Raintree" still serves as a book of family detection, as well as a straight biography and literary analysis.

Ross Jr.'s book is a massive concoction trying to be no less than a great American novel — and it is! It's American myth-making with inspiration all the way back to the Garden of Eden, 19th-century history, and everything he could throw into it, presented in an unusual form, but still with method and structure amid the sprawl.

Larry Lockridge explores his father's family history that heavily influenced "Raintree County." In the first half, this biography is a little too in-depth, particularly in the section where he analyzes his father's unpublished epic (really, really epic) poem. Things can get ... not tedious, but a little dull.

The second half, as Larry's father abandons a 2,000 page novel and starts over on "Raintree County" (on the other side of the typing paper!) is really great. The sources at Larry Lockridge's disposal as a family member are astonishing. Hordes of letters survive, including increasingly hostile communications with his publisher. Ross Lockridge Jr. was forced to cut portions of his massive (it was finally published at more than 1,000 pages) novel for the Book-of-the-Month Club and Houghton Mifflin; the pressure builds and builds, and the author, feeling cheated, sinks into the pits of depression. As his son tells us, it's not madness but illness.

It's a riveting descent Larry Lockridge reconstructs. His father had trouble facing the question of "What next?" when you've written a novel you've poured your soul into, that says everything you could want to say. Ross almost turns down the astonishing windfall of the MGM prize — and amazingly, his wife is fine with it if that's what he wants to do.

Letters, personal recollections of the principals in decades-later interviews, telegrams, memory. It all adds up to fine reconstruction of an interesting life and a tragic end that builds momentum after an ordinary first half. Larry Lockridge takes time to find his stride — some early paragraphs are oddly structured, and a good 40 pages could be knocked out of the first half without harming it — but ultimately pulls off a terrific look at an individual's and family's history, and does it with humor, sharp analysis and pathos. He also helps us understand better a true classic novel.

[Wyl Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

In his effort to explain and clarify his father's book I felt almost as confused as when reading the novel. The novel does have an interesting thread but it becomes so knotted at times that it is difficult to unravel the mess. Probably the most interesting fact was that the Ross and the author of the "Snake Pit" are related. That, to me, speaks volumes about the wandering paths that "Raintree County" and "Shade of the Raintree" have meandered.

[Matthew Furman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating portrait of a very complicated writer. I still don't know what the hell his original book was even supposed to be about.

[Bonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved Raintree County. I had a hard time getting into this biography of the author written by his son.

The last 158 pages were the reason I was interested in reading Shade of the Raintree. The pages prior were full of 'family history', of which I eventually skimmed. I understand that the characters of Raintree came almost directly from family, friends and acquaintances but having little knowledge of the area or the people I felt there was an excessive amount of background given before the meat of the book was served. Not being an historian or family member I would have preferred less description of outside influences in the lead up to Ross Lockridge Jr's personal experiences on the road of writing and publishing. This is the reason I originally gave this book a rating of 2 stars. I have changed the rating to 3 stars because, unlike the first 300, the last 158 pages captured and held my attention.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is so heartbreaking that I can barely write about it. My mother was familiar with the area where Laurence Lockridge grew. She might even have know him. I remember going to the movie preview of Raintree County with both of my parents and how they reacted. You can watch the movie and draw your own conclusion. This book is another of family secrets that if revealed may have made a difference in the lives of the Lockridges.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a fascinating look into the life of the author and led me to discover the book which he labored over for so long.

[Jene · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent and engaging biography, when most biographies bore me. But, then again, Raintree County is my favorite book, and Indiana history is my passion!