The Free Man, Always Young and Fair, The Light in the Forest, and The Grandfathers seem to represent for the author a respite from the creative rigors of … [his] more ambitious works. Yet they are by no means—nor were they intended to be—light exercises to keep authorial techniques sharpened for bigger things. For this reason, then, the impression that the four represent interludes results more nearly from artistic lapses than from Richter's intention….

[Of all] Richter's novels, The Free Man received possibly the sharpest critical rebuke. (p. 117)

A major reason for the novel's shortcoming is its purpose to inspire the present with lessons of the past, for Richter was writing in the midst of World War II. "Perhaps in an understanding of the Pennsylvania Dutch, their loyalty to democracy and their love of peace," wrote Richter in the preface to the novel, "may be found the...