SOURCE: “Raintree County Revisted,” in The Western Humanities Review, Vol. 10, Winter, 1956, pp. 57-64.

In the following essay, Blotner reevaluates Raintree County and attempts to account for the extreme diversity of critical opinion that the novel provoked.

The arrival of one recent attempt to write the Great American Novel was almost as unique as the book itself. In July, 1947, six months before publication, Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s 1066-page Raintree County won the $125,000 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Novel Award. When the book was published it was made the January selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, adding $25,000 more. Financial success was assured before a single copy had crossed a bookseller's counter.

The chorus of yeas and nays that followed from the critics seemed to contain enough favorable notes to assure critical success as well. It was called “an achievement of art and purpose, a cosmically brooding book full of significance and beauty.”¹ Dissents were just...