Skeleton Key to the Suicide of My Father, Ross Lockridge, Jr..: Author of RAINTREE COUNTY - Softcover

Lockridge PhD, Ernest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1460909763 ISBN 13: 9781460909768

Verlag: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011

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Reseña del editor:

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 Replete with hitherto unpublished photographs, and documents such as my father's medical records from his brief stint in a psychiatric ward shortly before his suicide, SKELETON KEY marries the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.

Biografía del autor:

Ernest Lockridge (b. 11-28-38) graduated Phi Beta Kappa, with High Honors, from Indiana University (1960). A Rhodes Scholarship finalist, he was Woodrow Wilson and Lewis-Farmington Fellow at Yale University where he earned "Honors" in all of his graduate classes, was awarded an Inaugural Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship (1962-3), and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in English within 3 years (1960-3). He was hired by Yale's English Department (1963-71) and was on the Yale Faculty during the "Golden Age" when the Yale English Department was internationally rated Number One. (At the time of his hiring he was the youngest member of the Yale faculty.) While at Yale, Lockridge was selected Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (1969-70). In 1971, Yale's 7 undergraduate literary prizes (including the never-before-awarded prize for Satire) were won by his students, with work written under his supervision. Lockridge is author of 3 novels. PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His TWENTIETH-CENTURY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GREAT GATSBY went through 20 printings, remained in print for a quarter-century, and continues to sell briskly on the Internet. All but one of his essays in literary criticism have been included in anthologies and singled out for special praise. From 1971-91, he taught English at The Ohio State University, Columbus Campus, where in 1976 he was made Full Professor and in 1985 received the University's premier award for teaching, "The O.S.U. Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching." In 1991, Lockridge took "early retirement" after nearly 30 years in full academic regalia, and has devoted himself to writing, jazz sax and clarinet, painting, travel, and family. He delivered "The O.S.U. Department of English Fifth Annual Emeriti Lecture," April 8, 2010. Emeritus Professor of English, Ernest Lockridge is a jazz musician and painter of award-winning paintings that hang in solo exhibits and galleries. He is father of 3, stepfather of 2, grandfather of 8.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1460909763
• ISBN 13: 9781460909768
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 228