[Richter's work] is all of a piece, for his one theme has been the American past. His aim, he has said, has been "not to write historical novels but to give an authentic sensation of life in early America." This he has been remarkably successful in doing, both because he has been a careful student of the relevant documents and because he has a deep sympathy with the life of earlier times. Although his books have often been popular, he has never written down to the masses. He has gone his own way, and he has no reason to regret it.

Since he has written so often about frontier life, Richter has had occasion to show why many settlers feared and hated the Indians. But in 1953, with The Light in the Forest, he deliberately took the point of view of the Indians, and found an ingenious way of doing so; for this is the story of John Butler, who was stolen from his white parents as a small child and eleven years later was restored to them. John, whose Indian name is True Son, bitterly resists his repatriation, but he is influenced by his exposure to white civilization, and in the end is alienated both from the people to whom he belongs by birth and those to whom he belongs by adoption and choice. In the latter part of the book the account of True Son's flight from the whites with his cousin has a nice Huck Finn quality, but what one chiefly remembers is True Son's indictment of Anglo-Saxon culture….

Richter has now written a companion volume to The Light in the Forest—A Country of Strangers…. This is the story of a girl, Mary Stanton or Stone Girl, who goes through a parallel experience. Married to an Indian, she flees with her infant son when she learns that she is to be returned to her white parents. Her flight finally takes her to Detroit, where she encounters another white girl who wishes she had been left with her Indian captors….

As in all his books I have read, Richter uses a style that is simple and yet scrupulously careful. Often one declarative sentence follows another as he describes a scene or presents a character…. Even when his sentence structure is more complex, as of course it mostly is, Richter's writing is direct and unpretentious.

Richter is by no means unaware that these two stories have a particular relevance to our own time. (p. 27)

Richter, as demonstrated by the lists of authorities to be found in several of his novels, has learned much about the old frontier, the land west of the Alleghenies. He has a feeling for the kind of life that was led there, its faults as well as its virtues but especially its virtues. His nostalgia, however, does not lead him into sentimentality, and he is incapable of the sensationalism that spoils so much of the fiction written about the pioneers. Although I am no authority on early American history, I suspect that his fiction comes as close to historical truth as fiction can.

It is a remarkable career that he has had, always and persistently out of fashion…. The great changes of the past fifty years must have touched him, but they have left no mark on his fiction. Yet he has always had a respectable body of readers, and honors have been paid him. His is not a name that comes immediately to mind when one is thinking of the important novelists of recent decades, but no careful history of American fiction in the twentieth century could ignore his work. He has been fortunate enough to have a sympathetic and loyal publisher … and he has a loyal following too. What his career hopefully suggests is that a man of talent and integrity may, with a little luck, thumb his nose at fashion and write the kind of books he wants to write. (p. 28)