[Although Richter's] historical trilogy is his most distinguished work to date, he is limited neither by one region nor by one fictional type. The three novels about middle western settlement are specific, documentary, and detailed, although their canvas is rather small. But his fiction about the Southwest is atmospheric, dramatic, and episodic. His four books of stories about his adopted environment are as authentic and vivid as his studies of Pennsylvania and Ohio life, yet they are different in tone and even in technique. (pp. 189-90)

New Mexico, with minor extensions into Texas and Arizona, forms the locale of Richter's southwestern fiction, and the time is generally the nineteenth century. Border raids, Indian uprisings, the arrival of settlers, and the bitter feuds of stockmen and nesters provide the plots; vaqueros, herders, half-breeds, sheriffs, outlaws, Spanish patentees, English and Yankee adventurers, and a sprinkling of lawyers and doctors are the characters; and rivalry and revenge suggest the tension of early territorial days. But Richter generally avoids sensationalism for its own sake….

In 1936 Richter published his first book with a southwestern setting, Early Americana and Other Stories…. The nine stories deal mostly with the frontier period. Historical places … suggest the setting, and the characters in the main are ordinary figures—mountain men, soldiers, ranchers, Indians, homesteaders. Although violence enters into many of the tales, the reader is spared much of the actual brutality. Killings and mutilations are reported rather than photographed, and the rumored Apache outrages suggest a destiny which is always imminent but seldom an actuality. To insure life in such a world of savagery certain basic qualities were essential. Richter's men are quiet, tight-lipped, hawk-eyed, self-reliant, determined, proud. His women often lament the providence that brought them to the southwestern plains and criticize the men who led them there, but they remain despite their loneliness, isolation, and danger. Men and women alike possess the courage which alone can guarantee survival.

Reduced to basic events, Richter's plots are simple episodes. (p. 190)

The stories are short, succinct, uncluttered. Never interested in documentation for its own sake, Richter selects authentic details but uses them sparingly. Scenes are suggested rather than underscored. Atmosphere is more important than a specific canvas. Yet emotions are kept taut, and strong impressions of passion and danger are conveyed. Proceeding somewhat like an impressionistic painter, Richter employs bright and challenging colors but concentrates more on mood and tone than on unblurred outline.

In 1937 appeared his familiar novelette of New Mexico ranch country, The Sea of Grass…. In Conrad Richter's version of a familiar pioneer theme, the hero exults in his fight against nature and a crude environment, but the heroine is resentful, dissatisfied, and finally a fugitive. Yet neither husband nor wife perishes in the struggle, and with the occupational feud in the region settled by nature, the story ends quietly.

In his third volume about the Southwest, Tacey Cromwell, which appeared in 1942, Richter eschewed the grasslands for the more sophisticated and more seamy life of the small mining town…. Richter was less successful here than in The Sea of Grass in fusing atmosphere and characters. The scenes are too often the finely outlined but metallic plates of an album, accurate, colorful, but remote. If Gaye is an acceptable but conventional gambler who sincerely wishes to find a less parasitic profession, Tacey is harder to accept, the scarlet woman with the heart of gold whose reform is perhaps genuine but is not made convincing. Her life does not have the passionate justification of sin that makes Hawthorne's Hester Prynne memorable; she is cold and marmoreal. (pp. 191-92)

The Lady [is] a novelette in form which evinces all the charm and impact of a subtle artistry. Again the setting is the New Mexico of the past, the period of the open range which is fought over by ranchers and sheepmen. And again racial strands are mixed in the figures of the story. Aristocratic inheritance and opportunist cupidity symbolize the rival parties, and in the end the heritage evaporates and the avarice is cooled by death. (p. 192)

The reader of Richter's three southwestern romances cannot fail to observe a technique which suggests Willa Cather, despite a difference in scene and milieu. Avoiding an omniscient point of view and avoiding also a point of view limited to the protagonist, he has three times chosen as his narrator a young male relative of the chief family, who is occasionally in attendance, who reflects the crucial events, and who retains a warm and close interest in the action. (p. 193)

In setting as in characterization Richter … relies heavily on suggestion and atmosphere. No scene is ever fully developed, and there are many hiatuses in plot continuity. Yet, particularly in The Sea of Grass and The Lady, the reader is eminently conscious of a viable milieu and social order.

Like Willa Cather again, Richter is selective. Neither writer has any sympathy for the naturalistic technique, which requires complete documentation, a deliberately slow unfolding of the story, and too often a conscious choice of seamy and vicious elements. Life in the Richter romances is actually far from pretty…. Adultery and bribery are common practices. But the romances do not focus primarily on these things, and they are seldom exaggerated. Repetition and attenuation are not key devices here. Sensational events are suggested or reported, and they exist primarily for their effect on motivation and characterization. Even details of setting are sparse but crucial. The cool patios, the dusty plazas, the adobe buildings, the whitened sand-deep roads, the sun-baked mesas establish the scene irrevocably without need of elaboration. (p. 195)

Despite the fact that Richter has devoted four books of fiction to New Mexico and contiguous territory, he has never depicted the contemporary scene in a novel…. Because of this historical orientation he has been forced to derive the substance of his tales from literary sources, and when he has allowed his imagination free play he has peopled the trails and ranches of another time. One can be grateful to Conrad Richter for his accomplishment, an accomplishment which establishes him as one of the most successful and durable storytellers of our day…. (pp. 195-96)