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.
Houghton Mifflin's first reader advised rejecting the novel, as the publisher had earlier done with The Dream of the Flesh of Iron, but the newly submitted work was reconsidered and accepted for publication.
After the telephone call came, offering him an advance against royalties of $3500—more than a year's salary at Simmons—Lockridge asked for and was granted a leave of absence from his teaching duties.
(Among the material to be jettisoned was a fantasy auction of the hero, who in an echo of Lockridge's reaction to his draft status was advertised as "back from the wars without any hurts, after hiding behind a thousand skirts.")
Adding to the author's excitement and stress, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios awarded him a $150,000 prize that with escalators had the potential of amounting to $350,000—the equivalent of more than $3.5 million today—but he would have to cut another 100,000 words from the book.
During the publication process, concerns expressed by the Book of the Month Club led to the production of two versions of Raintree County.
As the book developed, Lockridge had created an alter ego for his hero, in the person of the outrageous "Perfessor" Jerusalem Webster Styles who delivers a blasphemous riff in praise of bastards, which included the three words, "Wasn't Jesus God's?"
There were faux nineteenth-century wood engravings on the endpapers, and a frontispiece locating the town of Waycross and the Shawmucky River, its meandering course spelling out the initials JWS.
The New York Times called Raintree County "a huge and extraordinary first novel ... an achievement of art and purpose, a cosmically brooding book full of significance and beauty.
"[18] By contrast, The New Yorker was scathing, calling the book "the climax of all the swollen, pretentious human chronicles that also include a panorama of the Civil War, life in the corn-and-wheat belt, or what not ... just the sort of plump turkey that they bake to a turn in Hollywood...."[19] (Compounding the pain to the author and the embarrassment to the magazine, the review referred to the book as "Raintree Country" and its author as "Lockwood.")
Writing in Saturday Review, the distinguished critic Howard Mumford Jones struck an admiring middle ground: "Latest candidate for that mythical honor, the Great American Novel, 'Raintree County' displays unflagging industry, a jerky and sometimes magnificent vitality, a queer amalgam of pattern and formlessness, and an ingenuity of structure that is at once admirable and maddening...."[20] Lockridge began to exhibit signs of mental illness in the fall of 1947.
After Life magazine published a ribald excerpt of Raintree County on September 18, he confided to his wife that "I walk past people and I wonder what they think."
"[21] Suffering from severe depression, Lockridge died by suicide from carbon monoxide poisoning on March 6, 1948, shortly after the book's publication.
The movie, also titled Raintree County, featured Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Eva Marie Saint.