The actual plot of "A Simple Honorable Man" is so simple that it suggests a short story or vignette rather than a novel. It is the life of Harry Donner, a Pennsylvania storekeeper who—shortly before the turn of the century—feels a call to the ministry. He packs himself and his family off to college and seminary, is at last ordained, serves a succession of Lutheran churches in one mining community after another, never achieves fame, dies poor.

If the book echoes and glows in the reader's memory, it is for reasons other than bare plot. For one thing, Conrad Richter has the gift of creating real characters, whom he portrays with sympathetic understanding rather than clinical detachment. The simple, stubborn, willful, often half literate people who move through the book ring true to anyone who knew any part of the American back-country before mass communications began...