[This essay originally appeared as a series of reviews in The New York Times between 1942 and 1950.]

During the eleven years 1940 through 1950 Conrad Richter wrote six novels. Of these three were slight and disappointing. The other three comprise Mr. Richter's trilogy about the pioneer settlement of Ohio from the first penetration of the forests by seminomadic hunters in the 1780s until the Civil War. The Trees, The Fields and The Town are certain to rank among the fine novels of our time. Taken together as a vast epic of the American frontier seen in terms of one family they are a majestic achievement. (pp. 137-38)

Conrad Richter's novels all seem to be efforts to convey in words vivid, accurate, emotionally suggestive impressions of important and typical phases in the development of American society. Mr. Richter is a thorough scholar steeped in the lore of the American past. With consummate artistry he writes as if he and his readers both were part of the vanished life of his stories, using the colloquial idioms and special turns of speech of his characters and never departing from their frame of reference. (p. 138)

Considering the length of the trilogy as a whole, its division into separate episodes and its loose and sprawling structure, it is amazing how emotionally powerful it is. There are wonderfully dramatic and moving stories scattered throughout all three volumes, and wonderfully perceptive full-length portraits of subtly developed characters. There is a rare quality in these glowing pages—the most finished yet unobtrusive artistry, and a profound understanding of the pioneer character as it was manifested in and affected by a way of life now vanished from the earth. These three novels are rich with the special atmosphere of the constantly changing past; and also with a special, intangible atmosphere appropriate to the characters' emotions in various circumstances. Without affectations or stylistic flourishes, Conrad Richter charged his trilogy with intense emotion, an austere but pure and genuinely poetic feeling.

As the climax of The Town approaches it becomes apparent that this is not just a superb chronicle of a forest hamlet from the first tree cut down by Sayward's father to the bustling energy of a Civil War city, nor just Sayward's story and that of her husband and children, although it is both of these things. It is also a carefully worked-out and dramatically developed contrast between the diametrically opposed characters of Sayward and her youngest son, Chancey. (pp. 138-39)

Like Sayward in her old age, and like Sayward's feckless, forest-vagrant father, Conrad Richter seems to yearn nostalgically for the life of the wilderness, when the world was still as God made it, unspoiled by towns and factories and railroad tracks; and for the simple virtues of the pioneers—courage, loyalty, friendliness and hardihood. This rosy impression of the forest life of the frontier may be one-sided and a little sentimental; but it is an integral part of Mr. Richter's work. He has not overlooked the suffering and privation, the failures and disasters of the pioneers. But the inner core of his trilogy had to be admiring if it was to express, as I believe it does, Mr. Richter's nostalgia for the lost world of the Ohio pioneers.

So the Ohio trilogy is, in its spiritual essence, a muted and mournful lament over time and change, realistic in detail but lyrical in mood. Sayward and Mr. Richter neither deny nor defy the never-ending tide of change; but they don't like it and they are firmly convinced that it would be a good thing for the world if more people met the depressing changes of modern life with the self-reliant grit of the pioneers. (p. 140)