[Always Young and Fair is] Richter's finest attempt at writing a psychological novel…. [Here] the characters in the tragedy dominate their environment, not so much as Sayward does by triumphing over it, as by being so intensely involved with each other that only the background is left for the historical setting. Lucy Markle, the lovely young daughter of Asa Markle, a wealthy mine owner, is courted by two cousins, Tom and Will Grail, as the story begins. Tom is the less fortunate economically o...

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&#x...

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 presen...

Conrad Richter has reclaimed two segments of the American past widely separated in geography and time. Early Americana is a collection of stories about buffalo hunters, cowpunchers, and homesteaders in the region of the Staked Plains, the Llano Estacado of Southwest border history. The Sea of Grass holds within its brief framework the sweep and drama of the cow country at the end of the last century, when cattlemen fought to hold their free range against the nester's fence and plow. Tacey Cromwell ha...

While he was working on [his] philosophical essays, [Conrad Richter] was also writing short stories which illustrated his theories. Collected in a volume called Brothers of No Kin (1924), these stories are merely plot-ridden explanations of his ideas. At this point in his career Richter was more interested in dramatizing his esoteric philosophical notions than in re-creating meaningful life situations. The major message of Richter's philosophy is that hard times have their own rewards; they provide t...

Conrad Richter's three novels of the Southwest provide us with provocative portraits of women on the frontier and at the same time suggest a feminine perspective on western achievement. Each novel focuses on a central female character whose story is told by a male narrator recalling the experiences of his boyhood and youth. The boy is in each instance a family relation of the man who is married to or closely associated with the leading female character. The boy thus provides a sympathetic but essenti...

The only novelist with whom Conrad Richter can well be compared is Willa Cather…. But Richter belongs to a later generation, which both sees the pioneers from a longer perspective and (paradoxically) enters into their lives with a greater emotional immediacy. Between the generations of Willa Cather and of Conrad Richter a myth has begun to form, and this myth has worked to deepen and (in some ways) to distort the tales of the contemporary writer. (pp. 77-8) Richter has usually been called a simple re...

When the noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner stated in an address in 1893 that the settlement of the West explained American development, he focused attention on an aspect of American culture which has received constant study and analysis ever since…. And perhaps the most whole-hearted exponent of [Turner's] viewpoint among contemporary American men of letters is Conrad Richter. His fiction is all but entirely a nostalgic hymn of praise for the vigor of the American pioneer. (p. 311) Much...

[Although Richter's] historical trilogy is his most distinguished work to date, he is limited neither by one region nor by one fictional type. The three novels about middle western settlement are specific, documentary, and detailed, although their canvas is rather small. But his fiction about the Southwest is atmospheric, dramatic, and episodic. His four books of stories about his adopted environment are as authentic and vivid as his studies of Pennsylvania and Ohio life, yet they are different in to...

The impact of the two World Wars on novelists of the last several decades has perhaps minimized the role of folklore either as central or as contributory in recent American fiction. But there is one … novelist who has employed folklore so frequently and so richly that it is surprising that no critic has previously pointed it out. I speak of Conrad Richter, the author of a trilogy of novels about the settlement of the old Northwest Territory…. Richter's fiction is not limited to this tri...

[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 hi...

[This essay originally appeared as a series of reviews in The New York Times between 1942 and 1950.] During the eleven years 1940 through 1950 Conrad Richter wrote six novels. Of these three were slight and disappointing. The other three comprise Mr. Richter's trilogy about the pioneer settlement of Ohio from the first penetration of the forests by seminomadic hunters in the 1780s until the Civil War. The Trees, The Fields and The Town are certain to rank among the fine novels of our time. Taken toge...

If you live with dreadful awareness of man's perplexity in the twentieth century …, then you will have a very disconcerting time trying to penetrate the simplistic world of Conrad Richter's hillbilly pastoral [The Grandfathers]…. [What] are we to make of an American short novel, so out-stripped by any meaning that we can look for in American life today, that it confronts us … with people called Granpap, Granmam, Ant Dib, Uncle Heb, Uncle Nun, Fox, Babe, Chick, Felty, Sip, ...

For some years now we have had among us a top-flight writer working quietly on the story of one family and in a larger sense on the story of this nation's frontier…. Conrad Richter has been steadily piling up a record for solid and distinguished achievement. His writing is distinguished and poetic, both as to character and image. It is intensely atmospheric and backed, in the case of the historical novels, on sound research. Moreover he has the supreme gift of novelists in creating a world of ...

Followers of Conrad Richter and his writings about the American frontier should revel in the eight short stories in this collection—all dealing, as the titular story suggests, with "The Rawhide Knot" of marriage and the battle of the sexes with each other, the land, and society out West. And a changing, shifting West it is—in time, space, and idea—for Richter and for the reader. After reading these stories, some of which first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of the 1...

[The setting for "The Sea of Grass"] is Old New Mexico, land of the great cattle kings and of their vast ranges then slowly being invaded by the homesteaders…. The resemblances between this novel and Willa Cather's "Lost Lady" are … so striking that one is forever remembering the earlier book as one reads the new. Although this is not the masterpiece it is a good reproduction, something more, perhaps, than a reproduction. Conrad Richter's chief skill i...

I doubt that any one writing today in this country is closer in understanding and treatment of its pioneer life than Conrad Richter. He has not only given the frontier his scholarly attention and sympathetic interpretation, but he has done what is even more important; he has recreated the frontier and the early development of the nation in terms of atmosphere, character and even speech. He has that gift—the first and most important in a novelist—of creating for the reader a world as real as th...

Although the books of Conrad Richter tend to dwell on the past, there is a deceptive timeliness about much of this author's fiction, a tone of what might be called fashionable nostalgia. Each generation craves something different from the past, qualities the generation both lacks and misses. In his best work … Mr. Richter has afforded his readers the vicarious sense of heroism they long for without employing the pat heroics they have been schooled to suspect. His secret has been a style perfec...

It may take all kinds of people to make a world, but in Conrad Richter's mind one kind stands out above all others in the winning of the American Southwest. He has centered his group of romantic stories ["Early Americana and Other Stories"] around pioneer men as granite-faced as the canyon walls, as tight-lipped as the desert itself, and beside them … he has placed the same familiar breed of pioneer woman—the stoical, stiff-spined, resolute mate…. This author sets h...

"Early Americana" for [a] title names exactly the author's particular gift. All based on old tales collected from pioneers and from the children of pioneers, these stories present the poetry of early conquests. They are folklore fictionized. If they are, one and all, romantic stories, they are also true stories of quiet stern men and brave frontier women. Nor are the characters overdrawn or made to enact scenes of gun-play and violence. Violence is in the background, a kind of threat pe...

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 sit...

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 r...

Readers whose habit it is to turn to the last page after a glance at the first will get a misleading impression of Mr. Richter. They will see, with dismay, these words: "That's how life was, death and birth, grub and harvest, rain and clearing, winter and summer. You had to take one with the other, for that's the way it ran." Though there is a slight element in The Trees of the kind of sententious platitudinising this passage suggests, there is much more to it than that. There is...

"The Waters of Kronos" is an enchanted book…. I have found it, too, a deeply moving book, and I believe that many readers similarly will find it speaks to them directly and affectingly with a peculiarly personal appeal.

In his two earlier novels, "The Sea of Grass" and "The Trees," Conrad Richter has made a solid contribution to the long shelf of Americana; in "Tacey Cromwell" he goes back into the Arizona Territory a half century ago, to find a protagonist in the hennaed sporting-house madam who gives the book its name. Like others of this celebrated sisterhood, Tacey yearns for a husband and social esteem. (p. 6) Certainly there is material here for a novel of the magnetic West. ...

In a foreword to his posthumously published "The Rawhide Knot and Other Stories," Richter's daughter Harvena tells of her father's latter-day fascination with the New Mexico he moved to in middle age. Applying the same standards to stories of the early Southwest that he had used in his novels about the Eastern forests, Richter wrote five tales about the days of Bent's Fort and the Santa Fe and Chisholm Trails. They are published in "The Rawhide Knot" along wi...

["A Country of Strangers"] is a companion piece to "The Light in the Forest."… [The] earlier novel told of the return of a captive youth named True Son from the Delaware nation, of his numb misery in the home of his white parents, of his escape back to the only world he knew. Now, the author follows the same plot-pattern on the distaff side. Once again, he shows us how easily the ways of natural man, and the ways of civilization, can become mortal enemies. Once again, he m...

[The Fields, a sequel to The Trees,] is an equally amazing recreation of the life and speech and thought of the American frontier wilderness 140 years ago. In a series of separate episodes, each a complete unit in itself, Mr. Richter has shown through the life of one family the transformation of a hunting society into a farming one. Without needless display of his vast antiquarian background and with none of the cheap melodrama that degrades most historical fiction, he has told a wise and deeply moving stor...