Raintree County

Raintree County

…
which had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name musical and strange.

ROSS LOCKRIDGE, Jr.

Cover design: Joan Sommers Design

Cover illustration: © Clemente Botelho

This unabridged edition is reprinted by arrangement with the author's estate

© 1947, 1948 by Ross F. Lockridge, Jr.

Foreword © 2007 by Herman Wouk All rights reserved

This edition published in 2007 by

Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN-13: 978-1-55652-710-4

ISBN-10: 1-55652-710-1

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

For My Mother
E
LSIE
S
HOCKLEY
L
OCKRIDGE
This book of lives, loves, and antiquities.

I wish to acknowledge the assistance of my wife, VERNICE BAKER LOCKRIDGE, whose devotion to this book over our joint seven-year period of unintermitted labor labor upon it was equal to my own. Without her,
Raintree County
would never have come into being.

R
OSS
L
OCKRIDGE
, J
R
.

I
N
1947 I
PUBLISHED
Aurora Dawn,
a slender spoof of radio advertising in a pseudo-Fielding style. That year a big film company offered a munificent prize for a first novel, so I forlornly (yet secretly hopefully, of course) submitted my maiden effort. The winner of the prize was
Raintree County,
by Ross Lockridge Jr. When I read that novel, I pitied my own folly in trying to compete.

To this day I remember much of the book, while so many later novels have faded off: Nell Gaither, the blond lost love of the melancholy hero John Wickliff Shawnessy, and his magical initials JWS, the comic-philosophic “Perfessor,” the erotic clock in the town-hall tower, all in a thronged, hugely readable Civil War epic. The author took a bit of savaging for making so much money, but the critical reception that I recall was nationwide, tumultuous, and generally admiring, with a little condescending abuse from the usual sidelines. The novel was a resounding bestseller. Hard upon publication, the author committed suicide.

The story behind the novel was disclosed by his son Larry in an excellent memoir,
Shade of the Raintree,
which has powerful echoes of the book, with added bass notes of grim truth.

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.” For I realized in that reading that Ross Lockridge had pursued and—insofar as he could—captured the phantom prize he was really after, with movie money the farthest thing from his aspiring spirit. I knew nothing, of course, about the way his youthful literary work was distorted and mangled by the publishers and the film people, on its wretched road to publication. The naive, beset young author, utterly out of his depth, was unable to defend his art against the people whose money he had taken. Only when I read his son's threnody did the full tragic picture come clear to me.

The place of
Raintree County
in American literature I have no inclination or authority to discuss. To me as a fellow novelist, surely at the very least it should stand in the penumbra of Hawthorne near “The Great Stone Face”—a tribute, a grand variation on the theme of that deathless allegory, and a poignant artifact of the literary spirit in the twentieth-century American Midwest, by a greatly gifted contemporary who was killed with his whole life before him.

H
ERMAN
W
OUK

February 2007

Hard roads and wide will run through Raintree County.

You will hunt it on the map, and it won't be there.

For Raintree County is not the country of the perishable fact. It is the country of the enduring fiction. The clock in the Court House Tower on page five of the
Raintree County Atlas
is always fixed at nine o'clock, and it is summer and the days are long.

Raintree County
is the story of a single day in which are imbedded a series of flashbacks. The chronologies printed here may assist the reader in understanding the structure of the novel. At the back of the book may be found a chronology of historical events with bearing on the story.

Chronology
of
A GREAT DAY
for
RAINTREE COUNTY
July 4, 1892

Morning

Afternoon

Evening

(
Page numbers show actual order in text.
)

Election Day, 1844 H
OW ON THE MORNING OF
E
LECTION
D
AY