SOURCE: “Habits of the Heart in Raintree County” in Myth, Memory, and the American Earth: The Durability of Raintree County, edited by David D. Anderson, The Midwestern Press, 1998, pp. 56-67.

In the following essay, Goist examines the tension between individual and community in Raintree County.

Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), a widely discussed work by Robert Bellah and a team of social scientists, has once again reiterated the importance and urgency of understanding the tension between individualism and community in America.¹ This provocative work also provides a challenging framework for better understanding our culture, and I would like to use it as a model for analyzing one of the most ambitious novels ever written about life in the Midwest, Ross Lockridge Jr.'s Raintree County (1948). Lockridge's mammoth novel particularly lends itself to this approach because the tension between individualism and commitment to community...