Our Place, My Quest, and the Novel “Raintree County”

John Hallwas

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Midwestern author Ross Lockridge, Jr., who wrote “Raintree County,” an acclaimed, 1,060-page, number-one bestseller, back in 1948. Although it’s too long, and rather disjointed with its many flashbacks, the novel was widely celebrated—as “a cosmically brooding book full of significance and beauty,” in the “New York Times”; “a landmark in American fiction,” in the “Philadelphia Inquirer,” and so on.

I was only three years old then, so I didn’t run across “Raintree County” for some time, until I was a literature student at WIU in the 1960s, but when I did read it, I was stunned. I realized immediately that, in some astounding ways, it was a book about me—one that reflected central aspects of my inner life. 

The novel is centered on a man’s quest for identity in a rural, Midwestern county (in central Indiana), during the Civil War era and afterward, and it is also focused on the meaning or ultimate significance of that place, as a reflection of both America’s inner experience at that time and the entire, complex, human experience. The man is a teacher, which is what I was studying to be half a century ago—and what I soon became. And his name is John.

The inner life of John Shawnessy reflects an issue that confronts us all, and to which I was particularly sensitive through my own experience, as a young man with deep roots in a rural, Midwestern place who had left his home area to attend college in Macomb—and who never went back. Even as a youth, John Shawnessy realizes that he is an expression of his time and place (the 19th century in Raintree County), but “he was also pressing beyond the confines of himself,” striving for self-realization through inner development. He tries to resolve that conflict between belonging and individual self-growth by trying to comprehend his relationship to the area where he lives, and by relating that place to American culture and the human experience.    

His locale also has some astounding similarities to the rural Illinois county where I have lived for half a century. Oddly enough, fictional Raintree County is very unusual, “a perfect square” (like our McDonough), and it is crossed by a muddy, winding river (like our Lamoine), which twists and turns through the landscape, “where the bladed corn sways softly in the fields.” 

The county seat in the novel, Freehaven, is in the middle of things, where the main north-south and east-west roads cross, and it centers on a courthouse square, filled with old buildings. The brick courthouse, with its west-side cupola having the town clock, is the second such edifice to occupy that spot. It was even completed, believe it or not, in 1872—just like ours in Macomb. 

I was not an expert on McDonough County’s history 50 years ago, but I was nevertheless astounded by the similarity of locale. And I had already taken some interest in the area’s past, by interacting with residents who had been raised here (soon marrying one, in fact) and by reading in James Clarke’s “History of McDonough County” (1878), with its pioneer tales and exciting account of local participation in the Civil War. I was at the beginning of a long quest, too.  

Moreover, the culture of Raintree County is steeped in patriotic tradition and devoted to remembrance—just like the place I slowly came to know so well, which had been dominated by figures like C. V. Chandler and W. H. Hainline, men raised in pioneer families and impacted forever by their participation in the Civil War. In fact, the novel is set during a single day that is centered on Civil War remembrance, July 4, 1892, and it features a multitude of flashbacks, to depict the roots of that rural culture and John Shawnessy’s relationship to it. In some of those flashbacks, he also serves in, and is deeply impacted by, the Civil War.

My identification with John Shawnessy increased as I read the long novel, for reasons that were just as astounding. His life is marked the sudden, unexpected death of his mother, which was also true in my case. Partly for that reason, “he seemed to understand . . . the isolation and uniqueness of other human beings,” and he comprehended the human need for meaningful connection to a place. Late in the book, he not only visits his mother’s grave but ponders the mystic bond of local people to each other—and to the earth, as his spiritual life deepens.   John is also a bookish fellow, a committed reader, impacted by such famous American champions of place, nature, inner growth, and spiritual connection as “Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Whitman.” That’s a good brief list of some figures who have also impacted me.

Indeed, my strange connection with this book has actually deepened over the years, as if it were predicting my personal experience. As he gets older, John becomes fascinated with local history, and for example, he comes to value the old newspapers, which connect him not just to earlier days in Raintree County but to “the world of shared human meanings,” or common issues and experience, which is “the true source of oneself.” He realizes that social interaction within a thoroughly knowable place enriches our life experience, and also deepens us, so he becomes a proponent of meaningful remembrance and local commitment—what I call “community.”  

Later in his life, John becomes a local historian. Although his dream of writing an epic poem about his county never materializes, he does author a short “History of Raintree County,” and he also becomes—believe it or not—a weekly newspaper columnist. He writes not only about that locale, trying to make it meaningful for everyone, but about issues that impact the people of his time. He worries, too, that “the era of the glorification of the individual” has come, and deep human connection is fading. As readers of my “On Community” column know, that’s an ongoing concern of mine. 

No, I have never consciously tried to imitate John Shawnessy—who has problems, too, including grandiose dreams that inevitably fail and a troubled love life. But my connections with this long, once-celebrated book, depicting a place so similar to ours, are even more complex than I have space to explain—involving the author’s interests in nature, time, death, memory, religion, and more. My play “The Conflict: A Soldier’s Memories of the Civil War” (2011), my book “Here to Stay: Reflections on the Dead in a Small-Town Cemetery” (2012), and many other writings of mine reflect values and issues that clearly were also central to Ross Lockridge, Jr.   

Unfortunately, Lockridge never had the chance to gauge the impact of his acclaimed bestseller or interact with people who read it. Several weeks after it burst onto the literary scene and made him nationally famous, he committed suicide—at age 33. His quest for the meaning of human experience in a profoundly American place was over. But a book sometimes has a special connection with a certain reader’s life, a connection that verifies and extends the author’s vision.