Conrad Michael Richter was an American novelist whose lyrical work is concerned largely with life on the American frontier in various periods.
Background
Conrad Michael Richter was born on October 13, 1890 in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, the son of John Absalom Richter, a general merchant, and Charlotte Esther Henry, the daughter of a Lutheran minister. In 1899, Richter's father himself decided to become a Lutheran minister. This association with the Lutheran ministry was to strongly influence Richter's writing. The ministry figures directly in two of his best novels, the National Book Award-winning The Waters of Kronos (1960), in which the author's fictional counterpart undertakes a spiritual quest miraculously cutting across the present and the past, and A Simple Honorable Man (1962), the story of a minister resembling the author's father; it figures indirectly in Richter's other novels and stories.
Education
He graduated in 1906 from the Tremont, Pennsylvania, high school.
Career
Richter worked as a teamster, farm laborer, bank clerk, timberman, subscription salesman, and private secretary.
His work as a newspaper reporter and editor had the most pervasive influence on his writing, teaching him concision of expression: most of his fourteen novels are fewer than 200 pages long.
Richter published his first short story, "How Tuck Went Home, " in the September 6, 1913, issue of Cavalier. His first acclaimed story, "Brothers of No Kin, " appeared in the April 1914 issue of Forum and was reprinted in Reedy's Mirror, Illustrated Sunday Magazine, and The Best Short Stories of 1915. This became the title piece of Richter's first collection of stories, published in 1924; many of the other pieces had appeared in such magazines as American, Ladies' Home Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post.
Set mainly in the twentieth-century eastern United States, the stories were tailored to popular fictional modes and featured idealistic themes. Later collections of Richter's stories - Early Americana (1936), Smoke Over the Prairie and Other Stories (1947), and The Rawhide Knot and Other Stories (1978) - are set in the nineteenth-century American Southwest and celebrate pioneer virtues. Over the Blue Mountain (1967), set in twentieth-century Pennsylvania, is woven of themes appealing to children. Early Americana, Smoke Over the Prairie, and The Rawhide Knot display an artistic sophistication that is minimal in the other collections.
From 1922 to 1928, Richter and his family resided on a Clarks Valley, Pennsylvania, farm, where he wrote, in addition to short stories, two book-length philosophical essays, Human Vibration (1926) and Principles in Bio-Physics (1927). These espouse abstruse theories of human physical and psychological energy supply and expenditure. A third essayistic volume, The Mountain on the Desert (1955), employs a novelistic framework in support of those theories. The theories pervade all of Richter's novels and stories.
His wife's illness compelled the Richters to move in 1928 from Pennsylvania to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he turned to new subjects.
Over the next twenty-two years, he wrote seven novels. The Sea of Grass (1937), a nineteenth-century southwestern American tragedy about ranchers' feuds with farmers and the resulting demise of free rangeland, won a gold medal for literature from the Society of Libraries of New York University. It became the first of six of Richter's novels adapted for either motion pictures or television. Tacey Cromwell (1942) concerns an Arizona mining-town prostitute turned respectable foster mother. The deftly executed trilogy comprising The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Town (1950) - later collected as The Awakening Land (1966) - traces the life of a pioneer woman in Pennsylvania and Ohio in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The Free Man (1943) deals with personal and political freedom in Pennsylvania during the American Revolution. Always Young and Fair (1947), a recipient of an Ohioana Library medal, is set in the years between the Spanish-American War and World War I and depicts a Pennsylvania woman's obsessive devotion to a dead lover. In 1950, Richter returned with his family to Pine Grove, where he lived until his death.
There he wrote - in addition to The Waters of Kronos and A Simple Honorable Man - his final southwestern novel, The Lady (1957), a story about an aristocratic woman who avenges the murder of her husband and son, and four novels set in and around Pennsylvania: The Light in the Forest (1953), about a boy's Indian captivity, and its sequel, A Country of Strangers (1966); The Grandfathers (1964), a folkloric story of modern domestic confusion; and The Aristocrat (1968), concerning a spinster's warfare on modernity and mediocrity. Richter died in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
In his works, Richter employed restrained realism, quiet humor, and clarity and economy of expression to depict what he called the "small authenticities" of daily life. Even when subjects and themes derived from places and times unknown to him, his meticulous research involved him so personally that the final effect was as though he had experienced them.
In his best works, Richter produced notable historical and modern fiction. He created two epic fictional characters, James Brewton, a stoic rancher in The Sea of Grass, and Sayward Luckett Wheeler, the quintessential pioneer woman in the Awakening Land trilogy. Here and elsewhere, he transcended sentiment and simplicity to elevate to high art the theme of simple goodness.
Achievements
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.
