dual personalities

Today is the birthday of author Conrad Richter (October 13, 1890—October 30, 1968). Richter is one of my favorite writers, one I go back to over and over again. In fact, I just recently re-read The Waters of Kronos (1960) for the third or fourth time. He won the National Book Award for this book, and I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, Richter will probably be best remembered for A Light in the Forest because it was made into a movie by Walt Disney in 1958. It starred James MacArthur and Fess Parker.

They still teach this book in some middle schools, but he is not a “young adult writer” and he should not be relegated to that particular pigeon hole.

Louis Bromfield described Richter’s work this way: “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 the first page and in which he remains until the last.” (It should be noted that Louis Bromfield is not that kind a writer, but I’m glad he could recognize the gift in others.) Anyway, I whole-heartedly recommend The Awakening Land trilogy (The Trees, The Fields, The Town) as well as A Company of Strangers, The Free Man, A Simple Honorable Man, and The Waters of Kronos.

For a moment Sayward reckoned that her father had fetched them unbeknownst to the Western ocean and what lay beneath was the late sun glittering on green-black water. Then she saw that what they looked down on was a dark, illimitable expanse of wilderness. It was a sea of solid tree-tops broken only by a gash where deep beneath the foliage an unknown stream made its way. As far as the eye could reach, this lonely forest sea rolled on and on till its faint blue billows broke against an incredibly distant horizon.

–from The Trees (1940)