One of the greatest of … modern humanists is Conrad Richter, whose stories of American backgrounds have been appearing for the past ten years. (pp. 413-14)

[An] early, spontaneous, whole-hearted interest in native backgrounds and deeds of derring-do was a part of the heritage of many American boys who came to man's estate and, alas, outgrew such boyish nonsense. But not Conrad Richter. He had known his forbears as people and not as chromos on the wall; he recognized the ties between the present and the past, and as time went on, what had been a healthy boyish interest in cowboys and Indians became a mature humanism which impelled him to study the phenomenon of an American life that was rapidly vanishing.

The sources of Richter's inspiration are not hard to catalog…. But the most important source of all was the people who had lived through days that have...