During a career that spanned more than forty years, Conrad Richter published fifteen novels and four collections of short stories about the American frontier. He is now considered to be one of the foremost regional writers of the twentieth century. As Dayton Kohler observed in College English, "There are no novels quite like Richter's in the whole range of historical fiction. Together they probably give us the truest picture of the everyday realities of frontier life." His books have been popular among adult and teenage readers alike, and six have been adapted for movies and television. Richter also earned critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Town in 1951 and the National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos in 1961. The Light in the Forest has been a favorite young adult novel since its publication in 1953.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Richter's work received...