who bore the same initials as his maternal grandfather. The rest of the sprawling story would be told in flashbacks and in a long, concluding dream sequence. As before, it would be set in Indiana, in what any good Hoosier understood to be the heartland of the United States. The Civil War would be its defining event, as it had been for the country and for the poet Lockridge had selected for the subject of his abandoned Ph.D. dissertation. He would, he said, "express the American myth—give shape to the lasting 'heroic' qualities of the American people." Indeed, he intended to do nothing less than "write the American republic," thus completing a trifecta of James Joyce, Walt Whitman—and Plato. Though he was the father of three children, Lockridge was called for a pre-induction physical in February 1944. For the U.S. Army, this was a time of high manpower needs (the invasion of France was scheduled for the spring) and a much-depleted draft pool. He was classified 4-F—unfit for military service—when the doctors noticed an irregular heartbeat, probably resulting from his bout with scarlet fever. Meanwhile, his fictional hero was fighting in the Civil War. "For my part," he later said with mingled regret and chagrin, "while the Republic was bleeding, I hid behind a thousand skirts and let J.W.S. bleed for me all over the thousands of MS. pages of Raintree County. "Lockridge was a Vesuvius," in the words of John Leggett. "When he was at work, twenty or thirty pages spewed from his typewriter each day, some on their way to the wastebasket, others to be revised, endlessly before they were satisfactory, but always expanding." Indeed, Ross claimed to type at up to 100 words per minute, an incredible feat on a manual typewriter. Toward the end, he worked in one room while Vernice typed the clean version in another room, with young Ernest carrying papers from one to the other. "[M]y father was Gatling-gunning Raintree County through the old Royal [typewriter]," Ernest later wrote. Lockridge completed the 600,000-word typescript in April 1946. He put the novel's five sections into as many binders, put the binders into a suitcase, and splurged on a taxi to carry himself and his 20-pound package to the Houghton Mifflin offices at Two Park Street in Boston. Houghton Mifflin's first reader advised rejecting the novel, as the publisher had earlier done with The Dream