Of this second novel in Conrad Richter’s great trilogy, Louis Bromfield wrote:“The Fields continues the life of Sayward after her strange marriage to the ‘educated’ New Englander Portious, through the raising of their family of eight children. But it is much more than that; it is also the tale of the slow battle and eventual victory over the Trees and that relentless forest which even today marches in and takes over an Ohio field that has been left untilled for a year or t...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • In this superb novel—the longest Mr. Richter has written—Sayward, the eldest daughter of Worth and Jary Luckett, completes her mission and lives to see the transition of her family and her friends, American pioneers, from the ways of the wilderness to the ways of civilization. Here is the tumultuous story of the Lucketts, an American family born in the wilderness, grown to face the changing ways of America during the turmoil that was the first half ...

“They moved along in the bobbing, springy gait of a family that followed the woods as some families follow the sea.” In that first sentence Conrad Richter sets the mood of this magnificent epic of the American wilderness. Toward the close of the eighteenth century the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio river was an unbroken sea of trees. Beneath them the forest trails were dark, silent, and lonely, brightened only by a few lost beams of sunlight. Here the Lucketts, a wild, ...

An adventurous story of a frontier boy raised by Indians, The Light in the Forest is a beloved American classic.When John Cameron Butler was a child, he was captured in a raid on the Pennsylvania frontier and adopted by the great warrrior Cuyloga. Renamed True Son, he came to think of himself as fully Indian. But eleven years later his tribe, the Lenni Lenape, has signed a treaty with the white men and agreed to return their captives, including fifteen-yea...

This novel by one of America’s foremost writers—and perhaps the most truly American of all—is rock-based in values and virtues which most of the time seem to have disappeared from our fiction, if not from American life itself. The story of a storekeeper turned minister, A Simple Honorable Man is the fictional record of a life spent in the service of others, a life bringing the power of simple goodnessto obscure, sometimes earthy and violent people. Harry Donner (the fathe...

The powerful story-telling voice that has carried so many readers back into the world of the American frontier is heard again in these eight tales of pioneers and pioneer days by the author of The Sea of Grass, The Light in the Forest, The Waters of Kronos and The Town. Each story captures the force and sweep of our past in all its fierce reality, bringing us the strong, vigorous, unforgettable men and women of a simpler, harsher, more heroic time.The tit...

"May it never go out of print again": An old man returns to his now-submerged Pennsylvania hometown in this National Book Award–winning classic ( The Philadelphia Inquirer).The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Light in the Forest and The Awakening Land plumbs his own past to deliver a powerful novel of memory, family, forgiveness, and redemption.Nearing the end of his life, world-renowned novelist John Donner makes a final pil...

A "chronicle of a white girl captive of the Indians returned against her will to her white home . . . Her reception here, her rejection and that of her Indian son by her Caucasian father and sister . . . the conflicts of her Indian upbringing with the white way are related."

An infinitely attractive human being—a great lady, American-style—comes alive in Conrad Richter’s wonderful new novel.She is Miss Alexandria Morley, and in her eighties—a doughty warrior against creeping modernity and mediocrity. She has the warmest of hearts. She is the coolest of strategists. It is a joy to see her do battle.Secure in her Victorian mansion, in “her” Pennsylvania town, flying her flag in defense of principle and old-time decorum, she takes on and outclasse...

Henry Free, they called him now, or Frey in the dialect; and they knew him well in all the Pennsylvania land his own Palatine fellow countrymen had settled. They had even sent him to represent them in the Congress at Washington. Captain Free, they said, when they thought how he had fought for the freedom of the colonies a year before the Declaration of Independence. But few of them remembered that he had been Henner Dellicker in the old country, where he was born beside the Neckar; or the ...