Background
Conrad Richter was born on October 13, 1890, in Pine Grove, Pa. As a boy he traveled with his father throughout the farm settlements and was enchanted by the pioneer life-style and idiomatic speech.
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( Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1951 The Awaken...)
Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1951 The Awakening Land trilogy traces the transformation of Ohio from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character. The trilogy earned Richter immediate acclaim as a historical novelist. It includes The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950) and follows the Luckett family's migration from Pennsylvania to Southeastern Ohio. It starts when settler Sayward Luckett Wheeler becomes mother to her orphaned siblings on the frontier, and ends with the story of her youngest son Chancey, a journalist in the years before the Civil War. The Town won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize and received excellent reviews across the country.
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Conrad Richter was born on October 13, 1890, in Pine Grove, Pa. As a boy he traveled with his father throughout the farm settlements and was enchanted by the pioneer life-style and idiomatic speech.
Attending local public schools, Richter finished his formal education when he graduated at age fifteen from high school.
Graduating from high school, he determined to be a writer and began reporting for a local paper. After first working at random jobs-mechanics, coal breaking, farming-at the age of 19 he became editor of a country weekly. Following experience with the Pittsburgh Dispatch (1910) and the Johnstown Leader (1911) he moved to Ohio. His "Brothers of No Kin" was accepted by a magazine and selected by the Boston Transcript as the best short story of 1913. But discouraged by the low prices paid for fiction, Richter decided "to stick to business" and "write in my spare time only the type of story which would fetch a fair price, which I did. "After marrying Harvena M. Achenbach in 1915, Richter established a publishing firm. He started writing children's stories and then began his own juvenile periodical, Junior Magazine Book. During the next years his writing appeared under some 125 pseudonyms in various magazines. His short stories were collected in Brothers of No Kin and Other Stories (1924). A collection of short stories, Early Americana (1936), structured with the minute details of daily living on the frontier, resulted from his painstaking search for diaries, journals, and artifacts of the Old Southwest.
In Sea of Grass (1937), his first novel, he dramatized the cattleman-homesteader battle for the ranges of Texas and New Mexico at the turn of the century. It was later made into a motion picture. A family migrating west from Pennsylvania is portrayed in The Trees (1940), the first of a trilogy. A saga of 18th century pioneer heroics, this was a best seller. The Fields (1946) rather episodically traces the development of Ohio from its 18th-century wilds to the farms of the 19th century. The Town (1950) depicts the rise of industrialism in Ohio. The history is vivified in the simple and colloquial speech of the settlers. Richter's novella Tacey Cromwell (1942), set in an Arizona mining town, effectively uses local color. Always Young and Fair (1947) is a sociopsychological exploration of a turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania town. Continuing the "wilderness" milieu, Richter produced nine novels in the next 17 years. The Light in the Forest (1953) and A Country of Strangers (1966) are critical of "civilized" man, contrasted with the "white child raised by Indians. " The Lady (1957) returns to older tales of the Southwest. The Waters of Kronos (1960) portrays an Easterner who returns home after a satisfying stay in the West to find his residence under the waters of a hydroelectric plant. This novel takes a vigorous stand against man's heedless tampering with natural resources and, in effect, eternity. Although afflicted with a serious heart ailment during his later years, Richter produced such novels as A Simple Honorable Man (1960), The Grandfathers (1964), Individualists under the Shade Trees in a Vanishing America (1964), and Over the Blue Mountain (1967). The Aristocrat was published a month before his death on Oct. 18, 1968. With his protest against man's ecological destruction, his work has assumed increasing significance.
His novel The Town (1950), the last story of his trilogy The Awakening Land about the Ohio frontier, won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel The Waters of Kronos won the 1961 National Book Award for Fiction. Two collections of short stories were published posthumously during the 20th century, and several of his novels have been reissued during the 21st century by academic presses.
( Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1951 The Awaken...)
Quotations:
“Everywhere about the house in my dream, the sand was endlessly blowing, burying the print of the coyote and lizard, rattling in the vibora weed, driftng close to the ground like barren snow so that the whole earth seemed to be moving, a restless gray ghost of itself trying to find those lusty prairie breasts, fertile as a woman and flowing with milk and wild honey, that used to be. ”
“The sun beats down with a merciless white fire until the cloudless sky is scarcely blue but rather like the blade of a knife that for days has been ground to the stone. ”
Richter was concerned with the vanishing frontier as well as the dubious benefits resulting from advancing technology. Desiring to escape encroaching industrial urbanization, he sold his business and moved his family to New Mexico in 1928.
Richter married Harvena Maria Achenbach in 1915. They had their only child, Harvena Richter, in 1917.
