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."
Conrad Richter
Conrad Richter's America
Writing To Survive: The Private Notebooks of Conrad Richter
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Conrad Richter at Barnes and Nobel