I can’t say Conrad Richter is one of my favorite novelists because I’ve only read one of his books. But I can say that his novel The Light in the Forest is one of my favorites. The story takes place in Pennsylvania in 1764, a year after the French and Indian War ended.

Fifteen-year old True Son was kidnapped by the Delaware Indians when he was four years old. But when Colonel Henry Bouquet—the man who advocated infecting Native Americans with small pox—marched into Indian country with 1,500 soldiers and demanded the return of all captured whites, True Son is one of those whites. True Son doesn’t want to leave, though, but is forced to. He has a difficult time being forced to adjust to an alien, white-European culture—one in which almost everyone hates the Indians. Things go downhill for him from there, and when he finally escapes and returns to his real home with the Delaware, they reject him and he becomes a boy lost between two worlds. It’s not exactly a “feel-good” story, but one that probably a lot of colonists experienced because many, preferring life among their Native American families and friends, didn’t want to be repatriated. (One of the themes in S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon deals with that issue.)

Richter was born in Pine Grove, PA in 1890, a town settled in the early 1800s by immigrants from Germany’s Palatine region. But Richter’s family didn’t stay in Pine Grove. Instead, they moved around a lot within the state. Relocating from place to place allowed Richter to hear stories from various townspeople about how their ancestors had come there from overseas. When Richter was 19, he began writing and editing for local newspapers. He also began writing his own stories and published his first work—the short story “Brothers of No Kin”—in 1914.

Richter married Harvena Maria Achenbach in 1928, and their family eventually moved to the Southwest, first to New Mexico and later to Arizona. Richter became enthralled with the Southwest and began writing stories and novels about it. Many of his themes reflect his concerns about the disappearing frontier, the effects of increasing technology on society, and how human are destroying their environment. His The Awakening Land trilogy are three of his many novels that reflect these concerns. The Trees (1936) deals with the pioneers who moved from Pennsylvania to the unsettled Southwest. The Fields (1946) shows how Ohio changed from wilderness to farmland between the 18th and 19th centuries. And The Town describes how industrialization changed Ohio.

Personally, I think Richter was ahead of his time with these themes. I also think his trilogy will make interesting reading, and I intend to add them to my To Read list.

Richter died in 1968.