Ross Lockridge Jr.

The new novel was similarly based, though moved back one generation and focusing on a single day—July 4, 1892—in what may have been an emulation of James Joyce's Ulysses.

Instead of treating several Shockleys, it would have a single hero, John Wickliff Shawnessy, who bore the same initials as his maternal grandfather.

The rest of the sprawling story would be told in flashbacks and in a long, concluding dream sequence.

As before, it would be set in Indiana, in what any good Hoosier understood to be the heartland of the United States.

The Civil War would be its defining event, as it had been for the country and for the poet Lockridge had selected for the subject of his abandoned Ph.D. dissertation.

He would, he said, "express the American myth—give shape to the lasting 'heroic' qualities of the American people."

Indeed, he intended to do nothing less than "write the American republic," thus completing a trifecta of James Joyce, Walt Whitman—and Plato.

Ross Franklin Lockridge Jr. (April 25, 1914 – March 6, 1948) was an American writer known for his novel Raintree County (1948).

The novel became a bestseller and has been praised by readers and critics alike.

Some have considered it a "Great American Novel".

Lockridge committed suicide at the peak of his novel's success at age 33.

Ross Franklin Lockridge Jr. was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, the youngest of four children of Elsie Shockley and Ross Lockridge Sr., a populist historian, and lecturer.

Through his father, he was a double cousin of the novelist Mary Jane Ward.

Lockridge graduated from Indiana University in 1935.

He was known as "A-Plus Lockridge" and graduated with the highest average in the history of the university at the time, despite having earned an unaccustomed B during two semesters at the Sorbonne in Paris.

The year abroad had made a great impression on Lockridge, not least in setting his standard for future success, and he instructed himself to "write the greatest single piece of literature ever composed."

Following his graduation, Lockridge came down with either scarlet or rheumatic fever and was sick for nearly a year.

In 1936, he returned to the university as an English instructor and M.A. candidate, writing his thesis on "Byron and Napoleon."

Lockridge married Vernice Baker in this year, and together they had their first child.

In September 1940, Lockridge accepted a fellowship at Harvard University, and the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While working toward earning a Ph.D. in English, Lockridge also was writing what was characterized as an "unreadable 400-page poem."

Entitled The Dream of the Flesh of Iron, the work was submitted to and then rejected by the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin in 1941.

Around this time Lockridge was teaching at Boston's Simmons College while ostensibly working on a dissertation about Walt Whitman.

Instead, he wrote 2,000 pages of a novel with the working title American Lives, based on his mother's family, the Shockleys.

In the summer of 1943, Lockridge turned those pages over and began to type on the other side.

Though he was the father of three children, Lockridge was called for a pre-induction physical in February 1944.

For the U.S. Army, this was a time of high manpower needs (the invasion of France was scheduled for the spring) and a much-depleted draft pool.

He was classified 4-F—unfit for military service—when the doctors noticed an irregular heartbeat, probably resulting from his bout with scarlet fever.

Meanwhile, his fictional hero was fighting in the Civil War.

"For my part," he later said with mingled regret and chagrin, "while the Republic was bleeding, I hid behind a thousand skirts and let J.W.S. bleed for me all over the thousands of MS. pages of Raintree County.

"Lockridge was a Vesuvius," in the words of John Leggett.

"When he was at work, twenty or thirty pages spewed from his typewriter each day, some on their way to the wastebasket, others to be revised, endlessly before they were satisfactory, but always expanding."

Indeed, Ross claimed to type at up to 100 words per minute, an incredible feat on a manual typewriter.

Toward the end, he worked in one room while Vernice typed the clean version in another room, with young Ernest carrying papers from one to the other.

"[M]y father was Gatling-gunning Raintree County through the old Royal [typewriter]," Ernest later wrote.

Lockridge completed the 600,000-word typescript in April 1946.

He put the novel's five sections into as many binders, put the binders into a suitcase, and splurged on a taxi to carry himself and his 20-pound package to the Houghton Mifflin offices at Two Park Street in Boston.

Houghton Mifflin's first reader advised rejecting the novel, as the publisher had earlier done with The Dream of the Flesh of Iron, but the newly submitted work was reconsidered and accepted for publication.

After the telephone call came, offering him an advance against royalties of $3500—more than a year's salary at Simmons—Lockridge asked for and was granted a leave of absence from his teaching duties.

Back in Bloomington, Lockridge became "more and more nervous" about the process of turning his huge book into a commercial product.