Each new book by Conrad Richter is a treat. In a time of loose writing, he works with meticulous craftsmanship and an uncanny knowledge of period. In that way, in "The Trees," he performed a miracle of reconstruction; and half in prose, half in poetry, told one of the best stories of early America that exists.

Now, in "The Free Man," he tells another tale of the Colonial period, a good story, but not a great one. He labors to make a point, and makes more of the point than the situation justifies. Richter comes of Pennsylvania Dutch people; worried, and justly so, about the feeling against German-Americans that came and is coming out of this war, he tells a tale of the early German settlers in Pennsylvania, and their aching desire for freedom. The point is a good one; there is lots of German blood in America, and most of it is here because it fled from a variation of what exists in Germany now. Germans love freedom; they've loved it for a long time: they've died for it, and a great many of them have died under the American flag ever since there was an American flag.

That's the theme of the story Richter tells….

Where Mr. Richter worries the point is in his accent upon what the Pennsylvania Germans did in the Revolution. They didn't fight the war alone by any means—and actually they formed only a few regiments. When they fought, they fought well, as Germans usually do; and when they faced the Hessians, as they did on many occasions, they drove home their hatred of Prussianism with the point of the bayonet. In this story, it should have been left at that; they were part of a revolution that took in every minority in America, but only part of it.

This isn't the best story Conrad Richter has done, yet it has the charm and the careful technique he gives to everything he writes. It is so much better than the usual padded historical romance that it deserves to be read. I only wish that Richter had told the story with no other thought than the telling; it would have made its own point.