SOURCE: “The Great American Studies Novel,” in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 274, No. 3, September, 1994, pp. 105-11.

In the following essay, Trueheart discusses Raintree County alongside Lockridge 's son Larry's biography of his father, Shade of the Raintree.

Fewer and fewer of us can imagine what it was like to be sentient in 1948, and so it behooves us to approach the thousand-piece puzzle of Raintree County, by Ross Lockridge Jr., with a certain humility. Such a novel would probably not be published today, let alone be so lavishly received. It is even hard to imagine that it could be written in a time like ours. Yet for a brief moment Lockridge was able to cast himself as an American Homer, whose portrait of an Indiana county sought to remake the American myth. Some critics, and American readers in large numbers, bought his audacious act.

Something was amiss, however, and probably always...