Ross Franklin Lockridge Jr. (April 25, 1914 – March 6, 1948) was an American writer known for his novel Raintree County (1948). The novel became a bestseller and has been praised by readers and critics alike. Some have considered it a "Great American Novel". Lockridge committed suicide at the peak of his novel's success at age 33. Early years Ross Franklin Lockridge Jr. was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, the youngest of four children of Elsie Shockley and Ross Lockridge Sr., a populist historian and lecturer. Through his father, he was a double cousin of the novelist Mary Jane Ward. Lockridge graduated from Indiana University in 1935. He was known as "A-plus Lockridge" and graduated with the highest average in the history of the university at the time, despite having earned an unaccustomed B during two semesters at the Sorbonne in Paris. The year abroad had made a great impression on Lockridge, not least in setting his standard for future success, and he instructed himself to "write the greatest single piece of literature ever composed." Following his graduation, Lockridge came down with either scarlet or rheumatic fever and was sick for nearly a year. In 1936, he returned to the university as an English instructor and M.A. candidate, writing his thesis on "Byron and Napoleon." It was during this time he married Vernice Baker, and together they had their first child. In September 1940, Lockridge accepted a fellowship at Harvard University, and the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While working toward earning a Ph.D. in English, Lockridge also was writing what was characterized as an "unreadable 400-page poem." Entitled The Dream of the Flesh of Iron, the work was submitted to and then rejected by the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin in 1941. Around this time Lockridge was teaching at Boston's Simmons College while ostensibly working on a dissertation about Walt Whitman. Instead, he wrote 2,000 pages of a novel with the working title American Lives, based on his mother's family, the Shockleys. Raintree County Genesis of the novel In the summer of 1943, Lockridge turned those pages over and began to type on the other side. The new novel was similarly based, though moved back one generation and focusing on a single day—July 4, 1892—in what may have been an emulation of James Joyce's Ulysses. Instead of treating several Shockleys, it would have a single hero, John Wickliff Shawnessy,