Town - Softcover

Richter, Conrad

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553119850 ISBN 13: 9780553119855

Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1978

Synopsis

The Awakening Land trilogy traces the transformation of Ohio from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character. The trilogy earned Richter immediate acclaim as a historical novelist. It includes The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950) and follows the Luckett family's migration from Pennsylvania to Southeastern Ohio. It starts when settler Sayward Luckett Wheeler becomes mother to her orphaned siblings on the frontier, and ends with the story of her youngest son Chancey, a journalist in the years before the Civil War. The Town won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize and received excellent reviews across the country.

About this title

About the Author

Before becoming one of America’s greatest novelists, Conrad Richter (1890–1968) worked driving a wagon over the mountains of Pennsylvania, in a machine shop, in a small-town bank, on a farm, in his own timber business, and reporting for newspapers, among other jobs. A dogged researcher, he wrote fifteen novels, most of them set on the American frontier, including The Light in the Forest and The Sea of Grass, as well as numerous short stories. His novels won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and many other accolades.

David McCullough is the author of The Wright Brothers, John Adams, 1776, and many other books of American history and biography.

Review

"The trilogy is unmistakably a single work, unified in its design, sustained in its inspiration. It pulses from beginning to end with the passion of the land, the flesh, and the spirit. It has the American heartbeat in it. Cut it and it bleeds American." —Edward Wagenknecht, Chicago Sunday Tribune

"Simple, unadorned, the prose flows fluidly and rhythmically, power emerging from its simplicity, striking you with the impact of a bullet." —M. G. Checrallah, Library Journal

"'The Town' stands on its own as an entity and may be read on its own as a full, rich and comprehensive novel based upon the lives of ordinary people, brave and even heroic in their own small ways. They talk and act like real people and while here and there, one encounters a crazy one or a criminal, these exist not as specimens for a psychiatrist crowding at the whole of a scene to the exclusion of all else, but as your neighbors and mine in any ordinary American community. Not one of these characters is dull, for the author has that power of good novelists which finds interest in everything, so that he is able to make even the bore an illuminating study of boredom." —Louis Bromfield, New York Herald Tribune Book Review

"There are scenes of sorrow, humor, and excitement; but overshadowing everything like a tall tree in a meadow is Sayward herself. . . . When we leave her, revered and respected by the town, but dying within sound of the new-fangled trains, . . . we feel a personal loss. . . . She might almost stand for a symbol of the pioneer woman. Maybe she is, but more than that she has at least for this reviewr become flesh and blood, an acquaintance, not a charactarization in a book." —H. S. Arnow, Saturday Review of Literature
 
“There are in the literature of the world few works of historical fiction that make the reader feel that the writer must have been a witness to what he describes; he was actually there and came back—a transmigrated soul—to tell a story. The Awakening Land is such a work . . . it would be a great novel in any literature.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0553119850
• ISBN 13: 9780553119855
• Binding: Paperback