Smoke over the Prairie

Conrad Michael Richter (October 13, 1890 - October 30, 1968) was an American novelist whose lyrical work is concerned largely with life on the American frontier in various periods. His novel The Town (1950), the last story of his trilogy The Awakening Land about the Ohio frontier, won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel The Waters of Kronos won the 1961 National Book Award for Fiction.[2] Two collections of short stories were published posthumously during the 20th century, and several of his novels have been reissued during the 21st century by academic presses.During the early 1930s, Richter had numerous stories published in pulp magazines such as Triple-X, Short Stories, Complete Stories, Ghost Stories, and Blue Book. His Early Americana and Other Stories (1936) was considered his first successful book.He persisted with his work, gradually writing and publishing full-length novels. Richter set his novels in different periods of American history on its changing frontier. He may be best known for The Sea of Grass (1936), set in late nineteenth-century New Mexico, and featuring conflict between ranchers and farmers. It was later adapted as a movie of the same name, directed by Elia Kazan and featuring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, released in 1947.Richter's novel The Light in the Forest (1953), set in late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and Ohio, featured challenges faced by a young white man who had become an assimilated Lenape Amerindian after being taken captive as a child. After the boy was returned as a youth to white culture, he was considered suspicious. This novel also became very popular and had a second life as a movie, released in 1958. Richter returned to the topic of the white child raised in an alien culture in his later novel A Country of Strangers (1966). As noted by Ernest Cady in his review in the Columbus Dispatch, both books were written from the point of view of Indians. He wrote of Richter,"He simply tells how he thinks things were for both Indians and whites, in a hard time of violence and danger and change on a raw frontier. And does it so convincingly that the reader senses that this indeed, is how it must have been."During this period, Richter also published the novels of his trilogy The Awakening Land, about the Ohio frontier: The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950). In 1947 he won the Ohioana Book Award for The Fields. The Town was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1951. In a review of the last novel, Louis Bromfield, also an Ohio writer and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote of the trilogy:"the three books are not only concerned with Sayward and her family but the growth and the astonishingly rapid development of a whole area which has played a key role in the nation's history... Mr. Richter has reproduced the quality and the speech of these people so well that a thousand years from now, one may read his books and know exactly what these people were like and what it was like to have lived in an era when within three or four generations a frontier wilderness turned into one of the great industrial areas of the earth.... '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 ever heroic in their own small way..."The trilogy was first published in one volume in 1966 by Alfred A. Knopf. It was adapted as a TV miniseries of the same name in 1978, in which several plot changes were made as a result of the changing social culture of the time, especially concerning race and sexuality. When the trilogy was reissued in 1991 by Ohio University Press, it was a revised edition that incorporated some of these changes.