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 includesThe Trees(1940),The Fields(1946), andThe Town(1950) and follows the varied fortunes of Sayward Luckett and her family in southeastern Ohio.
The Fieldstells 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.
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
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 newl³4
![The Fields [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/8/3/3/2_650397.jpg "The Fields [Paperback]")