of the Flesh of Iron, but the newly submitted work was reconsidered and accepted for publication. After the telephone call came, offering him an advance against royalties of $3500—more than a year's salary at Simmons—Lockridge asked for and was granted a leave of absence from his teaching duties. Back in Bloomington, Lockridge became "more and more nervous" about the process of turning his huge book into a commercial product. The editors wanted him to trim it by 100,000 words, including the dream sequence that he regarded as central to the book. (Among the material to be jettisoned was a fantasy auction of the hero, who in an echo of Lockridge's reaction to his draft status was advertised as "back from the wars without any hurts, after hiding behind a thousand skirts.") Lockridge and his wife, Vernice, therefore spent the rest of the year as before, "ceaselessly typing from morning to night." The task took until January 1947, meaning that Raintree County would not be published on schedule in April. Lockridge returned to Boston for what he thought would be the final push. He was given an office at Houghton Mifflin, from which he advised the staff on the book's illustrations, typography, cover design, and even the design of the dust jacket, showing green hills in the shape of his recumbent heroine. Because the company planned to publish another potential best-seller that autumn, it pushed Raintree County back to January 1948. Adding to the author's excitement and stress, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios awarded him a $150,000 prize that with escalators had the potential of amounting to $350,000—the equivalent of more than $3.5 million today—but he would have to cut another 100,000 words from the book. In negotiations that went through the night, Lockridge and M-G-M compromised on a reduction of 50,000 words, which, as he said, "virtually killed me at the time and took all of the sweet out of the prize." To Houghton Mifflin, he confessed that "six and a half years of effort have played me out and I'm not quite up to it physically." Nevertheless, he went to work, jettisoning one character and adding another. The 450,000-word revision was finished in August, whereupon the Book of the Month Club offered to make it a main selection—but only if further cuts were made. Meanwhile, Lockridge and Houghton Mifflin argued how the M-G-M award would be shared between them. At the same