[Richter's work] is all of a piece, for his one theme has been the American past. His aim, he has said, has been "not to write historical novels but to give an authentic sensation of life in early America." This he has been remarkably successful in doing, both because he has been a careful student of the relevant documents and because he has a deep sympathy with the life of earlier times. Although his books have often been popular, he has never written down to the masses. He has gone his own way, and he has no reason to regret it.
Since he has written so often about frontier life, Richter has had occasion to show why many settlers feared and hated the Indians. But in 1953, with The Light in the Forest, he deliberately took the point of view of the Indians, and found an ingenious way of doing so; for this is the story of John Butler, who was stolen from his white parents as a small child and eleven years later was restored to them. John, whose Indian name is True Son, bitterly resists his repatriation, but he is influenced by his exposure to white civilization, and in the end is alienated both from the people to whom he belongs by birth and those to whom he belongs by adoption and choice. In the latter part of the book the account of True Son's flight from the whites with his cousin has a nice Huck Finn quality, but what one chiefly remembers is True Son's indictment of Anglo-Saxon culture….
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