SOURCE: “Raintree County and the ‘Dark Fields of the Republic,’” in Myth, Memory, and the American Earth: The Durability of Raintree County, edited by David D. Anderson, The Midwestern Press, 1998, pp. 9-15.

In the following essay, Anderson discusses Raintree County as a great chronicle of emerging patterns in twentieth-century Midwestern America.

When Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr. was published early in 1948, it was subject to a barrage of critical and popular appraisal almost unparalleled up to that time. Whether its 1060 pages, with accompanying chronologies, lists, and maps, were seen as the embodiment of the American myth and the work that was destined to revitalize American fiction or as pretentiously swollen with undigested words and incidents, it could not be ignored, either by critics, by the general public, or, inevitably, by the Book-of-the-Month Club and M.G.M. Raintree County was, in those pre-talk-show days, a work of...