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1914–1948 · BORN BLOOMINGTON · FORT WAYNE CHILDHOOD, c. 1919–1924
The ruling, first. Ross Lockridge Jr. is often loosely called a Fort Wayne novelist. The record gives a narrower, exact tie, and this entry prints it at its true size. He was born in Bloomington on 25 April 1914. His family — Indianapolis first, then Fort Wayne — lived in Fort Wayne through his small childhood: he was five when his younger brother Bruce drowned here, and nine when the family returned to Bloomington in 1924. Bloomington is his ground: Indiana University, where he graduated with the highest average the school had awarded; Harvard; the novel; the death. Fort Wayne's claim on him is a childhood of about five years and a father's Fort Wayne career — real, formative (he grew up assisting his father's historic-site recitals), and not a Fort Wayne authorship.
The book, and the Fort Wayne mistake about it. Raintree County — 1,060 pages, carried to Houghton Mifflin's offices in a battered suitcase, published in January 1948 — tells the life of John Wickliff Shawnessy across a single day, 4 July 1892, in a fictional Indiana county. Because Johnny Appleseed runs through the book — its hero hunts the legendary raintree, said to have been planted by Appleseed, who lies buried in Allen County — the novel is regularly mis-shelved as a Fort Wayne or Allen County story. It is not. Lockridge built his county partly on Henry County, his mother's family's ground, and said the book was meant as a national, not a regional, novel. MGM paid $150,000 for the film rights, the book topped the bestseller lists, and on 6 March 1948, the day after it was declared the number-one bestseller in America, Lockridge took his own life in Bloomington, aged thirty-three. MGM's film followed in 1957. His son Larry Lockridge's biography, Shade of the Raintree (1994), is the standard life.
Sources: Larry Lockridge, "A Brief Synopsis on Ross Lockridge, Jr.," from the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature (2001); Indiana Historical Bureau / Indiana Public Media, the Lockridge father-and-son features (2019–2022); Indiana Magazine of History 112 (2016), citing the Fort Wayne years.