Each new book by Conrad Richter is a treat. In a time of loose writing, he works with meticulous craftsmanship and an uncanny knowledge of period. In that way, in "The Trees," he performed a miracle of reconstruction; and half in prose, half in poetry, told one of the best stories of early America that exists.
Now, in "The Free Man," he tells another tale of the Colonial period, a good story, but not a great one. He labors to make a point, and makes more of the point than the situation justifies. Richter comes of Pennsylvania Dutch people; worried, and justly so, about the feeling against German-Americans that came and is coming out of this war, he tells a tale of the early German settlers in Pennsylvania, and their aching desire for freedom. The point is a good one; there is lots of German blood in America, and most of it is here because it fled from a variation of what exists in Germany now. Germans love freedom; they've loved it for a long time: they've died for it, and a great many of them have died under the American flag ever since there was an American flag.
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