Skeleton Key To The Suicide Of My Father Ross Lockridge Jr Author Of Raintree County

WHY did my brilliant father, Ross Lockridge, Jr., execute himself at 33, March 6, 1948, while his first novel, RAINTREE COUNTY, was the Number-One Bestseller in America? Critics were hailing it as the sole recent contender for the ultimate American title, "The Great American Novel." Even as my father was murdering himself, he was experiencing critical and financial success beyond the greatest of great expectations. He died with full knowledge that his life, viewed from the street, had exceeded all but the most extravagant of human dreams. My book holds the SKELETON KEY that unlocks the Riddle of Raintree County. I offer this painful story less from choice than from an obligation to history and to truth, in order that the truth will not die with me. Squeamishness and mendacity, blood brothers, go hand in hand. Miss Manners plays no part this tragedy. Truth is not subject to etiquette or taste, and it is precisely because the truth about my father's brief, terrible life and his forlorn death is unspeakable that the truth demands to be told.

WHY did my brilliant father Ross Lockridge, Jr. execute himself at 33, while his first novel RAINTREE COUNTY held the Number-One ranking in the United States and was being praised by readers and critics alike as The Great Ameridcan Novel? Even as he was killing himself he was experiencing success beyond the greatest of great expectations, dying in full knowledge that his life, viewed from the street, had exceeded all but the most extravagant of human dreams. My book offers the Skeleton Key that unlocks the Riddle of Raintree County. I do this less from choice than an obligation to history and to truth. Squeamishness and mendacity, blood-brothers, go hand in hand. Miss Manners plays no part in this tragedy. Truth is not subject to etiquette or taste, and it is precisely because the truth about my father's brief, terrible life and his forlorn death is unspeakable that the truth demands to be told.SKELETON KEY is grounded in my own personal relationship with my father and other family members, especially his parents (my grandfather and grandmother), who had a lethal impact upon his life, then attempted a similar impact upon mine. My book is concretely and personally grounded, too, in the culture of the time--in particular, the Kinsey Institute, and Hollywood (e.g.,Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint, Edward Dmytrik and others connected with making of the motion-picture version of RAINTREE COUNTY). I experienced the filming of the movie. I attended its premiere. Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, Kinsey's colorful right-hand man, was our neighbor. As a child playing with the Pomeroy children I learned "peculiarities" of cultural significance, that shed light on my father's place in History.Embedded in my narrative is the covert culture of pervasive pedophilia and childhood sexual abuse, cocooned by institutional protection and denial, and permitted to persist, and to wreak unacknowledged havoc in the lives of innocents.A published novelist, I bring to my memoir a novelist's powers of observation, and a novelist's vision of the intricate, poisonous web of cause-and-effect that ultimately trapped my father and devoured him.Replete with hitherto unpublished photographs, and documents such as my father's medical records from his brief stint in a psychiatric ward shortly before his suicide, SKELETON KEY marries the Memoir with the Graphic Novel.

The impetus for this book was a public lecture Laurel Richardson gave in Melbourne in 2006. How and why Laurel Richardson’s writing resonates with so many others led to a qualitative research project investigating the impact of her work. This book is the outcome of that project. The nature of that connection between Richardson’s writing and her readers has been examined. Connections have also been drawn between Laurel Richardson’s writing and the importance of collaboration, community, inclusion, feminist engagement, social justice and the challenges involved in working in the modernised university. This book shows how Laurel Richardson’s groundbreaking work has influenced others and became not only a method of inquiry but also a method of empathy and imagination. Permission chronicles and celebrates the pioneering work and influence of Laurel Richardson. With contributions from over 50 scholars across the disciplines, beautifully curated by Julie White, Permission shows the wide reach of Richardson’s work. Richardson has blazed new trails in the academy by writing honestly, creatively and passionately about things that matter. In doing so, she has opened a space for others to find their voices and carve their own paths. This book shows how grateful we are for the permission she has provided. A must-read for those new to Richardson’s work as well as her many fans worldwide.” – Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., creator and editor of the Social Fictions series

n poem after piercing poem—“The Light Here,” “An Ocean Sound,” “Nancy’s Sandwich Shop Heightened Consciousness”—Grigsby weaves our intense human moments of love, sorrow, or joy into the beauty and grandeur of our indifferent earth. The art of his vision is unique and invaluable. —Julian Markels, author of The Marxian Imagination Like James Wright before him, Gordon Grigsby is an essential Mid-Western poet, a hard-scrabbled farmer of words, a steel-worker tending to the furnaces of an imagination that flares in darkness: "the praised madness that trembles the air." The geography of Ohio, the names of its vanished Indian tribes, the smell of a dead child and the poisoned rain, are here given their full measure of terrible beauty. —Michael Salcman, author of The Clock Made of Confetti and The Enemy of Good Is Better Dawn Night Fall explores the interplay between sorrow and hope, tragic realities and the mind’s freedom, through startlingly original images and ideas. As in Walden, Grigsby uses his house on a small river in Mt. Air, Ohio as a way into the natural world, ancient and personal history, world travels, and complex combinations of pain and luminosity: ashes of a premature baby, woman and children waiting in corrugated tin shanties, a loved father lonely in Sun City, the glow of needles on a forest floor, streetlamp glint on everyone’s hair. Readers are richly rewarded for his extraordinary vision. —Jan Schmittauer, Associate Professor, Ohio University

Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s novel, Raintree County, was the publishing event of 1948. Excerpted in Life magazine, the novel was the Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, winner of the enormous MGM Novel Award, and first on the nation's bestseller lists. Many years later, Larry Swindell, the syndicated critic, would write that "no myth is more imposing than the Great American Novel; but if it is truly unattainable, I believe that Ross Lockridge made closer approach than any other writer has, before or since". It was Lockridge's first novel and his last. Two months after its publication, the thirty-three-year-old author from Indiana took his own life, leaving a wife and four children. His son Larry was five years old at the time. Shade of the Raintree is a son's search for an understanding of his father's baffling act. It is also the moving story of what it is like to grow up in the wake of a family tragedy, and to grow up with a novel instead of a father. In this powerfully narrated biography, Larry Lockridge uncovers a life of great vitality, humor, love, and visionary ambition - but also of deep vulnerability. Ross Lockridge embodied so many of a writer's aspirations and fates - from the sudden vision of a work that might answer to ambition, to the all-consuming act of composition over months and years, to the dislocations of sudden fame and wealth, to the question that dogs every writer, What next? This is a story of the pride and generosity that attend the act of writing, and the terrible depletion that often follows. Shade of the Raintree is extraordinary in the way its author manages to combine a son's emotional investments with a sleuth's dispassionate inquiry. The result is anexhilarating, revelatory narrative of a life that was, in some ways, an allegory of the American writer. Raintree County is being republished by Penguin Books simultaneously with Shade of the Raintree. Even for those who have never read the novel, this biography offers a remarkable portrait of how artists may put themselves at risk in creating worlds of wonder and humanity.

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field. (Post)Critical Methodologies forms a chronology through the texts and concepts that span Patti Lather’s career. Examining (post)critical, feminist and poststructural theories, Lather’s work is organized into thematic sections that span her 35 years of study in this field. These sections include original contributions formed from Lather’s feminism and critical theory background. They contain her most cited works on feminist research and pedagogy, and form a collection of both early and recent writings on the post and post-post, with a focus on critical policy studies and the future of post-qualitative work. With a focus on the implications for qualitative inquiry given the call for scientifically based research in education, this compelling overview moves through Lather’s progressive thoughts on bridging the gap between quantitative and qualitative research in education and provides a unique commentary on some of the most important issues in higher education over the last 30 years. This compilation of Lather's contribution to educational thinking will prove compelling reading to all those engaged in student learning in higher education worldwide.

Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge-accomplished sociologist and published novelist-explore the fascinating interplay between literary and ethnographic writing. The exciting result is an intriguing experimental text that simultaneously delves into, reveals, simplifies, and complicates methodologies of writing and conveying experience. This boundary-crossing text will provide an ideal platform for students and professors interested in understanding and exploring the absorbing complexities and possibilities of ethnographic writing and creative nonfiction.