Conrad Richter | |
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| Born | Conrad Michael Richter (1890-10-13)October 13, 1890 Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | October 30, 1968(1968-10-30) (aged 78) Pottsville, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Years active | 1924–1968 |
| Known for | The Sea of Grass,The Light in the Forest,The Town,The Awakening Land |
| Spouse | Harvena Achenbach (died 1972) |
| Children | 1 |
Conrad Michael Richter (October 13, 1890 – October 30, 1968) was an American novelist whose lyrical work is concerned largely with life on the American frontier in various periods. His novelThe Town (1950), the last story of his trilogyThe Awakening Land about the Ohio frontier, won the 1951Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[1] His novelThe Waters of Kronos won the 1961National Book Award for Fiction.[2] Two collections of short stories were publishedposthumously during the 20th century, and several of his novels have been reissued during the 21st century by academic presses.
Conrad Michael Richter was born in 1890 inPine Grove, Pennsylvania, nearPottsville, to John Absalom Richter, a Lutheran minister, and Charlotte Esther (née Henry) Richter. Coming from a long line ofPennsylvania Dutch ancestors,[3] his grandfather, uncle and great-uncle were alsoLutheran ministers, and descended from German colonial immigrants. As a child, Richter lived with his family in several small central Pennsylvania mining towns, where he encountered descendants of pioneers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who shared family stories. These inspired him later to write historical fiction set in changing American frontiers. Attending local public schools, Richter finished his formal education when he graduated high school at age fifteen.[4]
At the age of 19, Richter started working as an editor of a local weekly newspaper, thePatton, PennsylvaniaCourier. In 1911 Richter relocated toCleveland, Ohio, and worked as the private secretary to a wealthy manufacturing family. Richter married Harvena Maria Achenbach in 1915. They had their only child, Harvena Richter, in 1917. Richter worked subsequently for a small publishing company, initiated a juvenile magazine, and started writing short stories. During the 1930s, he also performed two brief stints as ascreenwriter forMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios inHollywood, California.[5]
Richter continued writing and trying to sell short stories.[4] In 1913, a young Conrad Richter sent manuscripts to literary editorFrederic Taber Cooper. Responding to Richter’s letter, Cooper writes that he does not give “gratuitous opinions on manuscripts, either to friends or strangers ... I suspect that your main difficulty is that, in straining after originality, you fail to make your stories ring true. Try to be simpler.”[6] His short story "Brothers of No Kin," published inForum magazine in 1914,[4] was included in the "Roll of Honor for 1914" of American stories byEdward J. O'Brien, editor of theBest Short Stories of 1915.[7] O'Brien wrote in his "Introduction" that Richter's story was the best of all those published in 1914; the editor was explicitly concerned with the development of an "American literature" and considered Richter as integral to this.[7] This short story was re-issued as the title story of a posthumous collection published in 1973.
In 1928 Richter relocated toAlbuquerque,New Mexico, for the sake of his wife's health.[5] During this period, he also collected much material from which he created short stories about the Southwest frontier days. By 1933, Richter and his wife had returned to live in his hometown ofPine Grove, Pennsylvania. They subsequently alternated between Pine Grove, Albuquerque, and Florida.[8]
During the early 1930s, Richter had numerous stories published inpulp magazines such asTriple-X,Short Stories,Complete Stories,Ghost Stories, andBlue Book.[9][10] HisEarly Americana and Other Stories (1936) was considered his first successful book.[8]
He persisted with his work, gradually writing and publishing full-length novels. Richter set his novels in different periods of American history on its changing frontier. He may be best known forThe Sea of Grass (1936), set in late nineteenth-centuryNew Mexico, and featuring conflict between ranchers and farmers. It was later adapted as a movieof the same name, directed byElia Kazan and featuringKatharine Hepburn andSpencer Tracy, released in 1947.
Richter's novelThe Light in the Forest (1953), set in late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and Ohio, featured challenges faced by a young white man who had become an assimilatedLenape Amerindian after being taken captive as a child. After the boy was returned as a youth to white culture, he was considered suspicious. This novel also became very popular and had a second life as amovie, released in 1958. Richter returned to the topic of the white child raised in an alien culture in his later novelA Country of Strangers (1966). As noted by Ernest Cady in his review in theColumbus Dispatch, both books were written from the point of view of Indians. He wrote of Richter,
He simply tells how he thinks things were for both Indians and whites, in a hard time of violence and danger and change on a raw frontier. And does it so convincingly that the reader senses that this indeed, is how it must have been.[4]
During this period, Richter also published the novels of his trilogyThe Awakening Land, about the Ohio frontier:The Trees (1940),The Fields (1946), andThe Town (1950). In 1947 he won the Ohioana Book Award forThe Fields.[4]The Town was awarded thePulitzer Prize in 1951.[1] In a review of the last novel,Louis Bromfield, also an Ohio writer and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote of the trilogy:
the three books are not only concerned with Sayward and her family but the growth and the astonishingly rapid development of a whole area which has played a key role in the nation's history… Mr. Richter has reproduced the quality and the speech of these people so well that a thousand years from now, one may read his books and know exactly what these people were like and what it was like to have lived in an era when within three or four generations a frontier wilderness turned into one of the great industrial areas of the earth…. 'The Town' stands on its own as an entity and may be read on its own as a full, rich and comprehensive novel based upon the lives of ordinary people, brave and ever heroic in their own small way...[4]
The trilogy was first published in one volume in 1966 byAlfred A. Knopf. It was adapted as a TV miniseriesof the same name in 1978, in which several plot changes were made as a result of the changing social culture of the time, especially concerning race and sexuality.
Richter's short story, "Doctor Hanray's Second Chance", first published in the magazineThe Saturday Evening Post in 1950 (June 10),[11] has a theme of reconciling with the past. Richter returned to this theme in his 1960 autobiographical novel,The Waters of Kronos (Chronos). (Chronos was the ancient Greek personification of Time.) This novel won the U.S.National Book Award in 1961.[2]
The short story "Doctor Hanray" was republished in the anthology,The Saturday Evening Post Fantasy Stories (1951) and in several laterspeculative fiction anthologies published by thePost and others.[11] TheInternet Speculative Fiction Database catalogs five of Richter's stories, including a very early one, "The Head of His House", from a 1917 anthology,The Grim Thirteen (Dodd, Mead).[11]
After Richter's death, two short story collections were published posthumously. Additionally, several of his novels have been reissued by academic presses. WhenThe Waters of Kronos was reissued in paperback format in 2003, one reviewer wrote,
To celebrate the reappearance of such a worthy novel may be an expression of regional patriotism, but it should also be an opportunity to think about our own small towns, our own haunted memories, and our own quest for the meaning of the past.
— Jeffrey S. Wood,Cumberland County History[8]
The Sea of Grass, The Trees and Tacey Cromwell were published asArmed Services Editions during WWII.
Richter received national and regional literary awards, and several honorary doctorates.
The author wishes to acknowledge his own Pennsylvania Dutch origins of mingled German, English, French, Scots-Irish and other blood that has been in America from 100 to 250 years.
