Larry Lockridge's Critical Annotations
The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr.
Author of RAINTREE COUNTY
Leggett's inferences, based on the limited evidence he made use of, were plausible, but they were frequently novelistic. He prefaced his biography with the comment, "I am a novelist and I believe that forceful biography employs all the techniques of the novel; those of setting, narrative, characterization and subjectivity. I believe in the biographer's right, within a limit, to portray his subject's reaction to experience, and the limit is truth, insofar as that can be determined from evidence." Some will say I'm simply writing a different novel. But I'll be depositing for the record an annotated copy of Ross and Tom in the Lockridge Collection at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, indicating factual errors (I count about eighty in the "Ross" part) and clear instances of "novelization"--not "interpretation" but instances of narrative bridges and interior monologue where no direct substantiation exists or where there is counterevidence (I count about sixty of various lengths).
--Shade of the Raintree, Notes and Acknowledgments, p 468
