http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AncCZnIJF6U
For Raintree County is not the country of the perishable fact. It is the country of the enduring fiction. The clock in the Court House Tower on page five of the “Raintree County Atlas” is always fixed at nine o’clock, and it is summer and the days are long.
Ross Lockridge, Jr, Raintree County
From 1957: DeForest Kelley, Lee Marvin and Montgomery Clift in Raintree County. Based upon a 1948 novel of the same name, Raintree County is a forgotten Civil War epic that went bust at the box office in spite of the star power of Elizabeth Taylor in her prime. I think it is a flawed film, overblown and too slow moving, but it has its moments. Its Civil War focus is on Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign and his March to the Sea, which makes it a good counter part to Gone With the Wind, a much greater film. No US Blue-ray or dvd has been released, but a gremlin tells me that the film may be viewed in its entirety on Daily Motion.
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGmKPHuaHb4
The novel was written by Ross Lockridge Jr., a “one book wonder” whose work was apparently modeled after James Joyce’s Ulysses (the action takes place in a single day with characters flashing back to memories of their past lives). The book sold out quickly and got rave reviews, and was hailed as a “Great American Novel” — but Lockridge, who had serious depression/mental illness issues, took his own life just 2 months after the book was published.
“Raintree County”, the novel, also plays a part in another book that I’ve grown fond of: “The Itinerant: A Heartland Story” by James Nowlan, a retired professor of government at the U of I who back around 2000 composed a novel set in small-town central Illinois in the late 1940s. The main characters in this story are an itinerant printer who gets a job at the local newspaper and the town’s librarian, a 30-something WWII widow, who engage in lengthy conversations about her favorite books, one of which is “Raintree County”.