[Always Young and Fair is] Richter's finest attempt at writing a psychological novel…. [Here] the characters in the tragedy dominate their environment, not so much as Sayward does by triumphing over it, as by being so intensely involved with each other that only the background is left for the historical setting.

Lucy Markle, the lovely young daughter of Asa Markle, a wealthy mine owner, is courted by two cousins, Tom and Will Grail, as the story begins. Tom is the less fortunate economically of the two, and when the cousins leave to fight in the Spanish-American war Lucy chooses Private Tom rather than Captain Will as her betrothed. Tom is killed in the Philippines. Lucy immediately goes into mourning and continues her devotion to her dead lover despite the pleas of her parents and the returned Will Grail. Finally she agrees to marry Will at a quiet ceremony. Instead of following her wishes her parents arrange a large wedding. When the day arrives and Lucy sees the crowd, she stubbornly locks herself in her room and refuses to join Will at the altar. Will remains faithful to her but she goes back to her devotion to Tom and the pictures of him she has placed all over the house. Finally Will goes to fight in World War I. He returns five years later a tired man desirous now only of peace and quiet. Then the Pine Mills American Legion dedicates its new post to Tom Grail. At the ceremony the main speaker's comparison of the youthful Tom of the picture that Lucy has loaned to the post for the occasion, to the aging Lucy, awakens her with a tremendous shock that she has not remained young with her lover, but has aged. She begins to despise Tom because she feels that he has caused her to deceive herself. She tries to recapture what she had with Will, but he is no longer interested. She finally gets him to agree to marry her. Coming very late to the ceremony Will gets his revenge on her for her earlier humiliation of him. They go to Maine for their honeymoon but instead of returning to Pine Mills they go to Europe and remain there for five years. When they return their delay is explained, for Lucy has aged considerably and Will is a helpless cripple. Both are bitter. Only Tom has remained young and fair. (pp. 84-5)

When reading Always Young and Fair it helps to realize that Lucy and Will are not new characters in Richter's fiction; only what happens to them is new…. They are the only major characters in Richter's fiction who end in tragedy because of their wilfulness.

Richter is very careful to show how strong-willed Lucy and Will are precisely so that their actions will [seem convincing]. (pp. 85-6)

It is apparent that time is an important factor in Always Young and Fair. Lucy … tries to stop the clock. (p. 86)

This is an unusual novel for Richter who had erected his fictional world on a substructure of nostalgia. Here we see that there can be a destructive kind of nostalgia….

The book, while obviously different from Richter's other work, is in some respects very similar. In its use of a narrator who idolizes the heroine and is related to her, it is very much like the three novels of the Southwest. (p. 87)

[But] Lucy Markle is the only Richter heroine who ends so miserably. (p. 88)

Of all of Richter's works this most nearly fits into the genre of the psychological novel. It also has a curious strain of determinism in it. There is, throughout, the suggestion that Lucy and Will are "fated" to live the life they do. (pp. 88-9)

I call it a "curious" strain of determinism because there is a blending in the novel of the two causes of disaster: wilfulness and fate. This same kind of shadowy premonition of disaster also appears in the Ohio trilogy. There it assumes the character of superstition; here, occurring in a more enlightened age, it can be called fatalism.

This novel, published between The Fields (1946) and The Town (1950), shares with the latter, a sense of tragedy. Unlike The Town it is not didactic, nor are its tragic elements in any way relieved. It is a very short novel, and that may in some way account for its being vaguely dissatisfying. It is not a failure because … the characters' actions are not properly motivated. Rather, it does not attain the stature it might have because, unlike great tragedy, it is depressing; one feels no elation at the end. The two sufferers have learned only to envy and despise Tom, the fortunate third party who has escaped by real death the living death of their unhappiness. Tragedy gives a new nobility to life. Always Young and Fair manages only to make its protagonists envious of an early death. (p. 89)

The Grandfathers (1964) is a charming novel of rural America in the early part of this century. Chariter, the heroine, is a member of the Murdock clan of Western Maryland. The two or three years covered by the story take the Murdocks and some of their friends and neighbors through a series of episodes ranging from comic to tragic. They are drawn with Richter's undying love for people who are down to earth, vibrant, mostly honest, and true to themselves. Their speech and manners are evocative of a time and place in American life that seem attractively simple. (pp. 90-1)

This novel shares with Richter's others a careful attention to the way people spoke in the time and place depicted. The speech is authentic, the stories, customs, habits, and superstitions carefully researched and artfully woven into the fabric of the novel. The Grandfathers is a delightful low comic contribution to our literary record of American rural mores….

The Aristocrat (1968) was Richter's last novel. Set in the Pine Grove of his birth it sketches charmingly the last few years of an aristocratic lady, Miss Alexandria Morley. Miss Morley is patterned after an actual inhabitant of Pine Grove whose integrity, candour, strength, courage, and wit Richter obviously admired. She is, in all of these traits, a memorable addition to his other heroines. (p. 92)

Clearly, the center of the book is Miss Alexandria herself, "frail but indomitable", in her eighties, symbolizing with the Morley mansion a time long past, a time when strong men and women dominated society rather than be dominated by it. She has the pioneer intrepidity that helped make this nation great. An index of what has befallen us is the awareness on everyone's part that this kind of individualism is an anachronism. She suffers no illusions; she knows (as does Richter) that she is the last of her breed. What a dull place Unionville (Pine Grove) will be without her.

Writing about his Pine Grove, Richter is able to evoke the memory of a rural America that is delightfully recalled and whimsically yearned for. The Morley mansion clearly dominates it, but its new apartment house, neglected park, noxious dump, busy collieries, and impressive mountains all live with the life that only first-hand experience can be transmitted into.

Although Miss Morley's last few years are sketchily drawn …, the book is given greater substance by forty pages of her deliverances on such topics as her parents, relations, friends, maids, and modern times. Most are delightful, a few give Richter a chance to have his say too. (pp. 92-3)

Yet she wears her wealth and her influence gracefully. Always a lady, but never afraid, always the aristocrat. (p. 93)

The first two volumes of Conrad Richter's second trilogy are a remarkable achievement. Seldom has a man written more candidly of himself and his relatives than has Richter in The Waters of Kronos (1960) and A Simple Honorable Man (1962). Richter was working on the third book, about his own life as an artist, when he died.

In this second trilogy Richter honestly attempted to portray his struggles with life's most teasing intellectual and spiritual problems: man's existence before and after this life, the tenets of organized religion, the differences in character from person to person, the father-son relationship, and the old problem of fate versus free will. He also exhibited in these two novels a great pride in various ancestors from whom he received what he considered a priceless legacy. The Waters of Kronos and A Simple Honorable Man … offer an invaluable insight into the mind and works of one of America's ablest authors.

The writing of The Waters of Kronos was a labor of love. In it the protagonist, John Donner, is very much like Richter himself, and Unionville, the scene of the novel, is Richter's beloved birthplace and long-time home, Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. The novel opens as John Donner, a noted writer, now seventy, comes back to the place of his birth to visit his ancestors' graves. The town itself is now covered by the dammed-up waters of the Kronos River. At dusk John Donner walks to the old Unionville road bordering the cemetery where an old man on a wagon pulled by three horses agrees to take him to Unionville. Incredulous, John Donner goes down the steep hill with his guide and finds the town as it was sixty years earlier. He spends the rest of the novel re-examining the scenes of his childhood and his several relatives as they were at the turn of the century. He meets everyone of importance in his childhood except his mother; at novel's end he waits for her in the house next door to hers. (pp. 107-08)

The Waters of Kronos has a much greater impact when its autobiographical implications are understood, yet few of its reviewers suggested that it might be essentially factual. Naturally they were puzzled by John Donner's journey back through time; and they are correct in feeling that what he learns doesn't seem to be important enough to justify the suspense generated throughout the novel. When the novel is read in connection with Richter's life and his other works, however, its meaning becomes clear. (p. 108)

Identifying Conrad Richter with John Donner makes it possible to examine the main problems of the novel in connection with Richter the writer, and with his works. Richter, it seems to me, intended this identification to be made. (p. 109)

Why must this successful author get back to the world of his youth? What unsolved problem of his childhood has worried him all his life? (p. 110)

The death of the body can be a terrifying thing. Richter is not as certain of immortality as his preacher-father was, and these doubts are what make death terrible. If Portius Wheeler is correct when he tells his son Chancey that there is no life after death, then death is indeed a formidable foe. But Chancey doesn't believe Portius the agnostic, and I don't think that Richter does either, finally.

What gives him hope and joy at the end of The Waters of Kronos is not just that he no longer identifies his fear with his father, but also that he can now draw strength from a source hitherto unavailable to him. He realizes that he is, despite his old age, "still the real and true son of his powerful, ever-living father, the participant of his parent's blood and patrimony". He realizes now that his father is "ever-living" in his son, with the immortality that breed insures….

His father had known all along that he was immortal, that this earth was not his permanent home but only a place of trial. And with this realization Richter becomes aware of why his father prayed, prayers that as a boy he found painful and embarrassing. His father was fighting, with prayer, the forces of evil and death. (p. 112)

With this realization of the truth about his father and their relationship, Richter was ready to write his father's fictional biography, A Simple Honorable Man…. Although at seventy he was able to re-evaluate his relationship with his father in a more favorable light, there were still unresolved differences between them. In this beautiful tribute to his father, A Simple Honorable Man, the crucial remaining difference is one of faith. (pp. 112-13)

Like The Waters of Kronos this novel is clearly autobiographical, including many of the same persons and places as the first. Instead of using the aged narrator again, Richter tries the omniscient author technique with limited points of view. This works very well because Harry Donner's life seen variously through his own eyes, and those of his wife and their eldest son, gives the reader a balanced view otherwise difficult to obtain.

A Simple Honorable Man includes the most minute and detailed autobiographical reminiscences. Richter's nostalgia for the American past, so obvious in his carefully researched novels, brought him at seventy to an exact rendering of his relatives as he remembered them. It is an undertaking with few equals in American literature. But it is more than just a nostalgic family history, for in the two novels Richter wrestled with his own metaphysical problems. By carefully examining his father's life of faith he gained invaluable insights into his own attitudes towards his minister father and his father's God.

This is clear from a careful analysis of the ending of the novel…. (pp. 113-14)

Is [the] last paragraph of the novel to be taken as ironical, and the father's ministry seen as meaningful and triumphant? Or does Richter intend its almost cynical cast as his father's epitaph? The ambiguity arises from the fusion of two points of view: immediately after his father's death Richter resented the waste of such a talented and altruistic man on such humble parishes as he chose to work in. But after twenty or so years his vision had mellowed to the point where he realized that his father had followed his heart to the situations where he could do the most good, humble as they were.

The novel re-creates with fidelity the American way of life during the first third of this century in the small mining towns of Pennsylvania. Everything rings true: the names, the characters, the Christians who do not love one another, and the altruistic Harry Donner in his simple but beloved humanity. The jet set and rock-and-roll seem like science fiction beside it. Yet tragedy is not absent, nor any of the evils man is heir to. Nevertheless, it is a refreshing glimpse of a time that seems long past. (pp. 114-15)

While Conrad Richter was somewhat willing to discuss the intent and purpose of his fiction, he showed little tendency to divulge the names of those authors who influenced him and his work….

Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Caroline Miller, and Willa Cather are the authors whose work Conrad Richter's is most closely related to. (p. 116)

One of the most important things Richter learned from Elizabeth Madox Roberts' work was the value of writing his Ohio trilogy in the language of the people he portrayed. Miss Roberts had great success with the idiom of the people of the land…. Richter was aware of the similarities in speech between her settlers of Kentucky and his own pioneers of the Ohio valley….

Another aspect of Miss Roberts' work that Richter used to advantage in his trilogy was the inclusion of folk tales and folk superstitions. Besides learning something about the handling of folk speech and folk material from Miss Roberts, Richter was undoubtedly impressed with the feminine strength and positive affirmation of life of [two of her heroines] Ellen Chesser and Diony Hall. (p. 117)

The single work most closely related to the trilogy is Caroline Miller's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Lamb in His Bosom (1933). There is only one major difference between Miss Miller's novel and the trilogy, and that is in the matter of religion. The God of Lamb in His Bosom is very much the God of the psalmist David, an Old Testament God. He is an ever present force in the lives of the characters. He answers their prayers and he punishes their sins, and is in every way immediately concerned with them. (p. 118)

The faith of Richter's characters is something quite different from this. It is no more sophisticated, but it is certainly less fervent.

The number of similarities between the Ohio trilogy and Miss Miller's novel is striking. In Lamb in His Bosom, the dialect, folk tales, and superstitions closely resemble the same elements in Richter's The Trees…. It was through reading Miss Roberts and Miss Miller that Richter realized that the language he was beginning to record in his notebooks was a suitable medium to use in his story about the early settlers of the Ohio valley. (pp. 118-19)

The episodic structure of [Lamb in His Bosom] very closely resembles the structure of the trilogy. The prose is somewhat similar too, lucid and faintly lyrical. Richter's gospel of hard work is here, as is his admiration for the closeness of family ties on the frontier….

Two of the finest aspects of the trilogy, Richter's wonderful portrayal of motherhood and his belief in the cleansing action of the land, are found here too. (p. 119)

Some of the finest aspects of Conrad Richter's work are the result of his life-long admiration for Willa Cather's haunting and memorable novels. Her portrayals of Alexandra Bergson and Antonia Shimerda served as models for Richter's greatest heroine, Sayward Luckett…. (p. 120)

Both writers mourned the passing of the frontier because it seemed to mark the end of the pioneer spirit too. They were both fervent admirers of the men and women of strength and character they found on the frontier. They did differ in that he never wrote a novel whose central concern was the degradation of values in the modern world. Miss Cather tried to come to grips with this new world…. (p. 121)

Besides differing from Richter in her willingness to try to paint the new order (an order she felt shabby when compared with the strength and quality of the pioneer spirit), Miss Cather also differed from him in her abiding interest in the artistic spirit and temperament. She felt that the true success or to the pioneer was the artist. Both face formidable obstacles, and both realize in their final triumph that they have preserved their individuality by their single-minded struggle. There is no Thea Kronborg in Richter's work. The closest he comes to seeing the artist as the true successor of the pioneer is in his own life. He undoubtedly felt that through his dedication to a career of writing he had remained faithful to the spirit of his pioneer forefathers.

Conrad Richter, as well as Miss Cather, found that living close to the land and the seasons helped to give meaningful order to life. They mourned the separation from nature that modern urban culture brought about. This separation from the order of nature is clearly one of the reasons why modern man feels vaguely alien in the world that was once his home. (pp. 121-22)

Another point at which Willa Cather's frontier novels differ from Richter's is in her choice of the immigrant as pioneer. The Lucketts of Richter's trilogy are at some remove from their immigrant forefathers. Both writers used material that they were familiar with, particularly material accumulated by observation and story in their childhood. Miss Cather's neighbors during her Nebraska girlhood were European immigrants…. She was fascinated by them, and they, in turn, regaled her with stories she remembered all her life. Richter, on the other hand, was two and three generations removed from his ancestors who first came to this country. Some of these ancestors he observed as a child, the others his mother and aunt told him about in story. It isn't surprising that the two writers, both of whom began their major work in their late thirties …, and both of whom looked on their own pasts with deep nostalgia, should have chosen for their heroes and heroines the kinds of people they knew in their youth. Their greatest pioneer heroines, Alexandra Bergson, Antonia Shimerda, and Sayward Luckett are not so far apart in nationality, geography, or time, as they are close in determination, perseverence, and indomitable strength.

Connected with this is Miss Cather's interest in the artist. It is in this regard that the European qualities of her chosen people are most important. This artistic feeling is something that Richter's pioneers do not have. In one way the European Mr. Shimerda is quite different from the "woodsy" Worth Luckett. He has brought some of the culture of the Old World to the Nebraska plain where it cannot sustain itself. Only those, like Antonia, who can adapt to the demands of the land can survive. But Worth Luckett is as much a casualty of the pioneer way of life as Mr. Shimerda. His art, hunting, although different from Mr. Shimerda's violin playing, is equally out of harmony with an agrarian society.

Miss Cather's interest in the artist leads her to an indictment of the frontier that Richter does not have to make. In this one thing, the antagonism of the pioneer community to the needs of the artist, Miss Cather finds the frontier deficient. Richter, antithetically, indicts Sayward's son Chancey's way of life (the only life in the Ohio trilogy approaching that of the artist) when he sets it against the life of his pioneer mother in The Town. (pp. 122-23)

[Miss Cather] does not share Richter's whole-hearted acceptance of frontier values. Her return to the frontier as her subject matter left her with two ideals which she could put together but never reconcile. The resulting tension gives her work much of its dynamism and strength. (pp. 123-24)

Richter, too, has tried to present the important aspects of the world he chose to depict, rather than tell all. A shy, retiring man, he was incapable of pouring out his art in the riot of emotion with which his contemporaries could sometimes write. Miss Cather's writing reflects the same kind of temperament.

Along with the spare "furniture" of their novels is a lucid, concise prose. In their avoidance of some of the obvious excesses of naturalism they treat sex with a never quite Puritanical reserve. Miss Cather is better at it than Richter. The love between Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata is a beautiful and memorable one. In Richter's work only the tragic romance of Chancey Wheeler and Rosa Tench in The Town approaches it. (p. 124)

[Miss Cather's] Alexandra, Antonia, and [Richter's] Sayward believe that through their tireless efforts to subdue the land some future generation will have advantages they didn't have. Their authors imply that this newer race will never appreciate the really valuable things in life as these three great pioneer women did. For Willa Cather and Conrad Richter the frontier experience was important precisely because it helped to develop, at least for one brief moment in our history, human beings of great substance, strength, and fortitude. (p. 126)

Among Richter's contemporaries only A. B. Guthrie, Jr. invites comparison. His two fine frontier novels, The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949), are memorable portraits of two phases of the Westward movement. They are related to Richter's work in their portrayal of strong pioneer types. However, they are not concerned with the agrarian themes of O Pioneers!, My Antonia, or the Ohio trilogy, nor are they written in a similar style. Mr. Guthrie's sensibility is not so delicate as either Cather's or Richter's; he is often coarsely realistic, both in the actions he depicts, and in the language he uses. He does, however, share Richter's belief that the frontier was a developer of strong character…. Both authors have also tried to show that there was a time in American history when things were very difficult, and they have portrayed a breed of men and women who, by triumphing over these difficulties, rose to heroic stature. That two of their novels, The Way West and The Town, won the Pulitzer Prize in successive years is evidence that modern Americans have an abiding interest in the reality and myth of the frontier.

Conrad Richter learned many important lessons from three great American frontier novelists: Willa Cather, Caroline Miller, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts…. Of course, his own treatment of the American frontier is distinctly his own, for it was his personal vision of a nation young and vigorous, where men and women of great courage were tested and not found wanting. This authentic and memorable frontier is Conrad Richter's America. (p. 129)

Marvin J. LaHood, in his Conrad Richter's America, Mouton, 1975, 145 p.