The actual plot of "A Simple Honorable Man" is so simple that it suggests a short story or vignette rather than a novel. It is the life of Harry Donner, a Pennsylvania storekeeper who—shortly before the turn of the century—feels a call to the ministry. He packs himself and his family off to college and seminary, is at last ordained, serves a succession of Lutheran churches in one mining community after another, never achieves fame, dies poor.

If the book echoes and glows in the reader's memory, it is for reasons other than bare plot. For one thing, Conrad Richter has the gift of creating real characters, whom he portrays with sympathetic understanding rather than clinical detachment. The simple, stubborn, willful, often half literate people who move through the book ring true to anyone who knew any part of the American back-country before mass communications began homogenizing it with the urban norm. Most of all, the author has succeeded in depicting a minister who is both lovable and believable, a rare feat in fiction, where Protestant parsons tend either to be impossibly holy, fatuous, or monsters of covert wickedness. (p. 4)

The sense of journeying back into a recent but forever-abandoned national past is accentuated by the way the book is written. It plays no sophisticated tricks with time; there is no breath of Freud. The characters, so to speak, are loved into convincing reality by the author. Most of all, Harry Donner, with his dark moments and occasional nights of secret groaning, is a convincing picture of a simple but not silly soul, one who finds human beings inherently worth the compassion and self-giving that come natural to him.

From a purely formal viewpoint, there are things about the novel that trouble and confuse the reader at moments. The movement of the narrative is jerky, and one coal town and church seem to fade into the next without clean transitions. But the total impact of "A Simple Honorable Man" is of a particular beauty. If the words were not somehow hard to utter nowadays, one would say it is the beauty of goodness. (p. 26)