One of the greatest of … modern humanists is Conrad Richter, whose stories of American backgrounds have been appearing for the past ten years. (pp. 413-14)

[An] early, spontaneous, whole-hearted interest in native backgrounds and deeds of derring-do was a part of the heritage of many American boys who came to man's estate and, alas, outgrew such boyish nonsense. But not Conrad Richter. He had known his forbears as people and not as chromos on the wall; he recognized the ties between the present and the past, and as time went on, what had been a healthy boyish interest in cowboys and Indians became a mature humanism which impelled him to study the phenomenon of an American life that was rapidly vanishing.

The sources of Richter's inspiration are not hard to catalog…. But the most important source of all was the people who had lived through days that have now passed into history, and from them Richter garnered the little details and authenticities of early life as it was actually lived. No writer on American social history is more thoroughly at home with his material nor has anyone been more careful to preserve the spirit of times past. (p. 414)

[Richter's first widely-circulated story, "Brothers of No Kin"] had a remarkable reception and seemed to open the way to a brilliant writing career. E. J. O'Brien chose it as the best story of the year; it was reprinted a number of times, and magazine editors became aware of the existence of its author. Success, however, carried disillusionment with it, for the twenty-five dollar payment which Mr. Richter received only after screwing up enough courage to ask for it, was paltry…. This helps to explain the standardized mediocrity of the early Richter stories, with the exception of "Brothers of No Kin." Several of them were collected and issued as Brothers of No Kin and Other Stories (1924), and all that can be said for them is that they are "well-made" stories, tailored for the trade. Some have elements of nativism and local color, some have a glimmer of characterization, but for the most part they give the impression of assembly-line mass production which at best gave the author practice in the art of writing. The titular story belongs in a different category. It is a bare narrative of a man who in taking the sins of a friend upon his own head gives up the Kingdom of Heaven…. In this simple story of faith and self-sacrifice, the outline of Richter's later humanism is readily discernible. (p. 415)

There was nothing new or startling about the Richter stories which began to appear in the magazines early in 1934. On the surface they were Western stories of a high order, authentic, carefully conceived, and skillfully narrated. Closer scrutiny reveals how vastly different they are from the type of Western to which Americans have become accustomed. These are stories of pioneer fortitude aimed at a depression-ridden world; and the contemporary soul, battered and bewildered by life, though them is brought into closer contact with people of another age who also lived, loved, struggled, and died but whose lives form a pattern out of which emerges completeness and serenity….

In the collection of short stories published as Early Americana (1936), Richter succeeded in relating the life of the nineteenth century Southwestern frontier to the life of the present. By depicting the people of that day during the course of the daily round of human contacts with the land, the weather, tools and equipment, enemies and friends, all against a colorful regional background, he achieved a realism that is not governed only by the outward aspects of drudgery, drabness, and despair. There were such qualities as courage and silent heroism; there was a record of solid and stubborn achievement, and Richter's insight into the spiritual side of a life that could be both drab and terrifying is a tribute to his painstaking research and his knowledge of human nature. (p. 417)

Richter is acutely aware of what this life meant to the women; some of his finest characterizations are brought about by little flashes of insight into the souls of these women. Not all of them are frontier heroines, but stoicism, perseverance, and a grim acceptance of conditions over which they have little control are marked characteristics. Pioneer fortitude can be sickeningly overdone; extreme realism is often a false indictment of a way of life. Such pitfalls are avoided by Richter, for his interest lies neither in the legendary heroine nor in the victim of frontier neuroses. His chief concern is with ordinary women to whom the life was neither heroic nor lacklustre; it was a life that had to be lived, and, when material values failed, spiritual forces could be drawn upon for sustenance. (p. 418)

For a writer of carefully constructed, almost condensed stories the planning of a novel [such as The Sea of Grass (1937)] must have presented some formidable problems. There were patterns to follow, but the long, padded epic so typical of American historical fiction did not appeal to him. Faced with highly theatrical material which verged on the melodramatic, he was brief and restrained almost to the point of taciturnity in his treatment of it. The result is a completely successful short novel which meets even the most exacting literary standards.

Mr. Richter's method is objective. Against a vast background of grassland and desert faithfully, even artistically painted, the dramatic essentials unfold. A quarter of a century of change is packed into a few pages without sacrificing either perspective or proportion…. [The Sea of Grass is the story] of change which destroys and builds at the same time, of the past which succumbs to the present and of the personal tragedy which attends the tide of progress. The vastness of the theme to some extent overshadows the characters, and in less skillful hands they would be little better than stock performers in a melodrama. The stage property effects of hero, villain, and fair lady may be seen; but since life itself is not free from melodrama, certain theatricalisms could not be avoided entirely. Had they been, the truth would have suffered. The irresistible force of agrarianism meeting the immovability of established tradition and use did not result in a clear-cut victory for either, and in reconstructing one such struggle Richter had added another chapter to our social history.

By 1940, when The Trees was published, Richter had reached his full stature as a proponent of the American heritage. In this novel he turns to the frontier of an earlier day, to the development of the old Northwest, and in this account of the pioneering experiences of a hardy, illiterate Pennsylvania family he epitomizes the whole story of Western settlement. There is none of the glamor of historical pageantry; there are no heroics, no carefully staged dramatic situations, no great names and no great deeds. This is a story of the common man told in the homely idiom of that man; a story in which the daily and the yearly round of primitive existence is faithfully described and one which recaptures the moods and thoughts of an age that was governed almost entirely by necessity. The natural simplicity of the story is in itself a work of art. Richter's familiarity with pioneer life, the result of many years of careful study, is nowhere permitted to appear obtrusive. What he achieves is a pioneer's eye view of frontier existence and of a group of people who "never preen themselves before posterity." You would have to seek far in American fiction to find a truer picture of how our pioneer ancestors really lived, and it is safe to say that The Trees is one of the finest novels on this aspect of American life ever written.

The Trees is not an historical romance, nor is it an historical novel. It is a realistic narrative of the experience of the Luckett family, who migrated across the Ohio into new territory; of the trace through the endless forest, the building of a cabin, the coming of other settlers, and finally the ultimate disintegration of the family unit. Each member of the family is well and carefully characterized…. The death of the mother and the growing restlessness of the father throw the burden of family responsibility on [the eldest daughter] Sayward, and as a consequence "Saird" becomes the central character in the book. No romantic heroine, she is the personification of all those qualities so essential in the frontier woman. (pp. 418-20)

[Many of the book's] episodes leave a lasting impression, and all are woven together with the bits of homely lore that were a part of the lives of pioneer people. Sayward's marriage to the Bay Stater, Portius Wheeler, ends the novel and marks the passing of the frontier. Settlement had come to the land and to the people of the land.

In Tacey Cromwell (1942) the scene is once again the Southwest, this time a mining community in Arizona Territory toward the end of the last century. As in his other novels, Richter has been meticulous in gathering his material and has steeped himself in honky-tonk and mining-town lore of the nineties…. Tacey Cromwell is the carefully patterned story of a prostitute and a gambler who attempt to cross the great divide into the land of respectability.

Richter is an observer of human frailty but never a judge. He lets facts speak for themselves and makes no effort to tamper with the realities…. [It] is the character of Tacey, hard, competent, strong, and understanding, that dominates the story. Laid against a regional background of a "society" emerging from the license of a frontier mining community, this short novel depicts an important phase in the growth of American culture.

Mr. Richter's recent novel, The Free Man (1943), has been something of a disappointment. For the first time the short novel form proves inadequate to the theme, and failings so carefully avoided in earlier novels are noticeable. Here the author's power of expression has proved unequal to the greatness of his conception. There is a consciousness of historical things which partially blacks out the human element. It is not that Mr. Richter is not sure of his material—it is more that he has not assimilated it as carefully as in his previous works or that he has attempted to compress too much into too little space. Certainly the theme of this novel was as close to his heart as anything he has ever written—perhaps it was so close that it interfered with complete objectivity. Whatever the cause, one feels that a much greater novel should have resulted and that had circumstances been right such would have been the case. The Free Man is not a creative failure. It has moments of brilliance and flashes of insight into character. But the plain truth is that the novel is not up to its author's exacting standards when, considering the subject matter, it should have been one of the best books he has ever written. (pp. 420-22)

Mr. Richter's chief contribution to Americana is a restrained realism which depends greatly on brevity and understatement for its effect. This, combined with an understanding of people, a feeling for historical things which transcends mere knowledge, and the ability to think and write in terms of his characters and their environment places him among the chosen few who have made the past of America come alive. (p. 422)