If you live with dreadful awareness of man's perplexity in the twentieth century …, then you will have a very disconcerting time trying to penetrate the simplistic world of Conrad Richter's hillbilly pastoral [The Grandfathers]….

[What] are we to make of an American short novel, so out-stripped by any meaning that we can look for in American life today, that it confronts us … with people called Granpap, Granmam, Ant Dib, Uncle Heb, Uncle Nun, Fox, Babe, Chick, Felty, Sip, Morg, Effie, and Chariter, the Daisy Mae heroine of all this slightly amusing rural shebang? Or what are we to make of such cliché chapter-opening sentences as, "Sunday morning came to Kettle Valley mild and clear after early fog." One means, does there have to be a Kettle Valley, even without the cinematic felicities of Ma and Pa?

To carp at such bland devices would seem, no doubt, to indicate a case of chronic distemper in the overwrought urban reader Let it be said at once, then, that The Grandfathers is a pleasantly bucolic tale whose reading-time may just about equal, say, three or four sessions with "The Beverly Hillbillies." Chariter, the sixteen-year-old "fatherless" daughter of Dockey Murdoch—practically every young 'un in Kettle Valley ends up fatherless—herself becomes the prime object of the spring mating season….

Fill it all in—Granpap accused of arson, a property impasse between neighbors, Chariter's episode in the household of Squire Goddem, and you pretty well have the picture of Conrad Richter's vision of life in a Western Maryland mountain community. One has the slightest intimation, in reading all this, of a sometime struggle between the life-arranging insistence of the elders and the self-determination of the young. Certainly, this must be the only theme that the "grandfathers" of the novel can possibly serve…. [Conrad Richter has produced] a body of imaginative Americana which must sooner or later attract some critical attention. The early nannies who made clucking sounds of excess admiration for The Sea of Crass, for example, did not much help his cause by calling it a classic the day it was out. Following this, he was struck with one success after another …, before the age of [J. D.] Salinger and [John] Updike set all too solidly in. All to the good; but one is hard put to recall the vivid recreation—or even the name—of a single memorable character in this body of work. Neither has it, apparently, in any memorable or archetypal instance, recreated what must have been the traumatic experience of the American Adam reborn in the dark womb of the American continent.

In any case, with the writing of The Grandfathers, we are told that Richter has attempted something quite different from his other books; and one supposes that this simply means that the latest one has a slightly larger dose of country humor than the others. This granted, however, it is incredible that Richter could have attempted even this minor episode with so little awareness of what, in his own time, has already been done in the genre of American pastoral: by Jesse Stuart in Taps for Private Tussie, John Steinbeck in Cannery Row, William Faulkner in The Reivers, Erskine Caldwell in God's Little Acre, and (seriously) Al Capp in "Li'l Abner." The first of these alone, and in itself a grossly underrated minor classic, is a far more engaging book than Richter's. The awakening of the young boy (Jesse Stuart?) to the wonder and fierce desire for book-learning seems much more genuine to me than Chariter's emergence from bucolic pubescence to tribal matrimony. And so on. (p. 67)