Raintree County Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Daniel Aaron

Critical Essay by Daniel Aaron

SOURCE: “On Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s, Raintree County,” in Classics of Civil War Fiction, edited by David Madden and Peggy Bach, University Press of Mississippi, 1991, pp. 204-14.

In the following essay, Aaron provides an overview of the plot and characters in Raintree County as well as a critical assessment.

Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s, novel, a mix of history and myth, encloses a single day, July 4, 1892, in legendary Raintree County, Indiana. As the hours tick on from dawn to midnight, flashbacks (some fifty in all) to distant decades gradually fill in the lives of the principal characters who have converged at Waycross Station near the town of Freehaven for the ceremonies. Thus the past is recaptured in the present and the future anticipated in the past. By the end of the day, and 1,060 pages later, all the pieces of what amounts to a giant jigsaw puzzle have fallen into...
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