SOURCE: “A Return to Raintree County,” in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 168-76.

In the following essay, Weales recounts the publishing and critical history of Raintree County.

Ross Lockridge, Jr. wanted to write a great book, perhaps The Great American Novel, that ignis fatuus that used to dance—and perhaps still does—before the eyes of ambitious young novelists. Although he and his publisher avoided the TGAN label when Raintree County was published in 1948, Houghton Mifflin marketed the book as a serious work of fiction, if a good read. Both the publisher and the author understandably wanted the novel to be profitable as well as admired. The attention that Raintree County got before and at the time of its publication—the MGM Award, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, an excerpt in Life (September 8, 1947)—assured the commercial success of the book. The image of America's newest literary Golden...