Overview

The Awakening Land trilogy traces the transformation of a middle-American landscape from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character. The trilogy earned author Conrad Richter immense acclaim, ranking him with the greatest of American mid-century novelists. It includes The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950) and follows the varied fortunes of Sayward Luckett and her family in southeastern Ohio.The Fields tells the story of Sayward as a wife and mother, working with her own brood on that hard frontier to create a durable home, and aspects of civilization in a region where life is still difficult and towns are just beginning to appear. It is a rich and human novel about personal conflicts and strife in the midst of a land that itself is striving. And it has an epic quality that perfectly reflects the sweeping conquest of the frontier.

Reviews

"The novel is an accurate, deeply understood picture of early Ohio." —Sterling North, Book Week

"It is Mr. Richter's gift to be able to saturate himself in early American history and give it out as the story of flesh-and-blood men and women. . . . The diction is a distillation of his painstaking and extensive collection of idioms. It resembles that of the mountain people of the South today, for they have kept a vernacular that was once general in the states east and west, the great, early mother-tounge of pioneer America." —W.K.R. Christian Science Monitor

"Written with feeling and rare insight. Excellent historical fiction." —L. R. Etzkorn, Library Journal

"A simple, poetic and touching story of how the frontier was built." —New Republic

"Conrad Richter, one of the distinguished story-tellers of our time, comes forward with another superlatively readable novel. . . . It is one of those unusual historical novels in which deep study and understanding are evident on every page, but in which men and women are so truly flesh and blood that one happily forgets they are historical." —Alfred Butterfield, New York Times

"What gives the book its very special flavor is its style, a speech approximating the store of eighteenth and nineteenth century speech collected by the author from old manuscripts letters, records, and other sources. By the skillful use of this device, the author has succeeded in making the reader see, feel, and think in the language of the characters of his book. In general, this is a sensitive re-creation of a passage in our history." —US Quarterly Booklist

"I doubt that anyone writing today in this country is closer in understanding and treatment of pioneer llife than Conrad Richter. . . . He has that gift—the first and most important in a novelist—of creating for the reader a world as real as the one in which he lives, a world which the reader enters on reading the first page and in which he remains until the last." —Louis Bromfield, Weekly Book Review

"A truly distinguished [book]... This is a sequel to The Trees of blessed memory, and it is an equally amazing re-creation of the life and speech and thought of the American frontier wilderness 140 years ago. In a series of seperate episodes, each a complete unit of intself, Mr. Richter has shown  through the life of one family the transformation of a hunting society into a farming one. . . . He has told a wise and deeply moving story about a woman who is almost great in her simple strength of character. Seldom in fiction has the atmosphere of another age been so completely realized. Part of the magical spell of Mr. Richter's book is cast directly by the prose, which makes loving and unpretentious use of the vocabulary and typical turns of phrase of its characters. A rare and haunting book is this, which on no account should be overlooked." —Orville Prescott, Yale Review 

Author Biography

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.

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