time, there were complicated negotiations about income-averaging to lower tax rates on income from the book. Publication During the publication process, concerns expressed by the Book of the Month Club led to the production of two versions of Raintree County. As the book developed, Lockridge had created an alter ego for his hero, in the person of the outrageous "Perfessor" Jerusalem Webster Styles who delivers a blasphemous riff in praise of bastards, which included the three words, "Wasn't Jesus God's?" That the BOMC could not tolerate. The three words were duly removed, but only after 5,000 copies had already been printed. The first edition press run was an extraordinary 50,000 copies, bound in green cloth imprinted with a golden raintree. There were faux nineteenth-century wood engravings on the end papers, and a frontispiece locating the town of Waycross and the Shawmucky River, its meandering course spelling out the initials JWS. This was all according to Lockridge's specifications. He also sketched the recumbent nude that was depicted on the dust jacket. The book was released on January 4, 1948, and the entire press run was sold out by the official publication day, January 5. The reviews were as extravagant as the novel itself. The New York Times called Raintree County "a huge and extraordinary first novel ... an achievement of art and purpose, a cosmically brooding book full of significance and beauty." By contrast, The New Yorker was scathing, calling the book "the climax of all the swollen, pretentious human chronicles that also include a panorama of the Civil War, life in the corn-and-wheat belt, or whatnot ... just the sort of plump turkey that they bake to a turn in Hollywood...." (Compounding the pain to the author and the embarrassment to the magazine, the review referred to the book as "Raintree Country" and its author as "Lockwood.") Writing in Saturday Review, the distinguished critic Howard Mumford Jones struck an admiring middle ground: "Latest candidate for that mythical honor, the Great American Novel, 'Raintree County' displays unflagging industry, a jerky and sometimes magnificent vitality, a queer amalgam of pattern and formlessness, and an ingenuity of structure that is at once admirable and maddening...." Illness and death Lockridge began to exhibit signs of mental illness in the fall of 1947. After Life magazine published a ribald excerpt of Raintree County on September 18, he confided to his wife that "I walk past