Early Americana: A Conrad Richter Tribute Page

Updated 06/04/2001

A Conrad Richter Tribute Page


There are in the literature of the world few works of historical fiction that make the reader feel that the writer must have been a witness to what he describes; he was actually there and came back - a transmigrated soul - to tell a story. The Awakening Land is such a work... it would be a great novel in any literature.
-- Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1968 edition of The Aristocrat

Conrad Richter wrote about the history of the areas he knew best: the areas in which he lived. He, better than anyone else writing historical fiction, was able to capture the rural traits, traditions and dialects of the 19th and early 20th century west with such novels as The Sea of Grass and Tacey Cromwell as well as the early pioneers of the Pennsylvania and Ohio valleys. His novels have been greatly loved an praised. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (for The Town) and the National Book Award (for The Waters of Kronos). His Awakening Land trilogy was made into an award winning 1978 mini-series starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Hal Holbrook. Louis Bromfield from the Herald Tribune described Richter and his work best: "He has that gift - the first and most important in a novelist - of creating for the reader a world as real as the one in which he lives, a world which the reader enters on the first page and in which he remains until the last."

The Works of Conrad Richter

Early Americana (Short Stories)
The Sea of Grass
Tacey Cromwell
The Free Man
The Trees
The Fields
The Town
Always Young and Fair
The Light in the Forest
The Mountain on the Desert
The Lady
The Waters of Kronos
A Simple Honorable Man
The Grandfathers
A Country of Stangers
The Awakening Land
The Aristocrat
The Rawhide Knot & Other Stories
Brothers of No Kin

About Conrad Richter & Links

Conrad Richter
Conrad Richter's America
Writing To Survive: The Private Notebooks of Conrad Richter
If You Like Conrad Richter, Try These Other Authors
Conrad Richter at Barnes and Nobel


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