I was fourteen when, in search of something to read in my grandmother’s house in Florence, South Carolina, I ran across a paperback copy of the 1948 novel Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr. It was an abridged version, published by Dell in 1957 in connection with the mgm screen adaptation that was released that year. I had never seen the movie, but, lying on the guest-room bed in that summer of 1971, I quickly became lost in the book.

Raintree County tells the story, from boyhood to late middle age, of John Wickliff Shawnessy, a mid-nineteenth-century Hoosier who is his county’s “one true aesthete.” In his earnest, idealistic youth, he devours the great literature of the ages and dreams of becoming an immortal poet; he develops a rivalrous friendship with Garwood Jones, who has his own more worldly ambitions; he studies under the lecherous cynic Jerusalem Webster Stiles, also known as “the Perfessor”; and he falls in love with a sweet, lovely local girl, Nell Gaither, only to find himself driven by circumstances into marriage to an unstable New Orleans belle, Susanna Drake. In the wake of a personal catastrophe he marches offto war, fighting his way through Georgia under Sherman and sustaining a wound before returning home, where still more tragedy awaits him. The chapters recounting these events are intercalated with episodes chronicling his experiences on July 4, 1892, when, older, more sober, and married for a second time, he welcomes Garwood, now