The Trees [Paperback]

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 Treesis the story of an American family in the wilderness—a family that “followed the woods as some families follow the sea.” The time is the end of the eighteenth century, the wilderness is the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River. But principally,The Treesis the story of a girl named Sayward, eldest daughter of Worth and Jary Luckett, raised in the forest far from the rest of humankind, yet growing to realize that the way of the hunter must cede to the way of the tiller of soil.

"Of its kind—and the kind is rare—the book is perfect. No detail is out of place, no word jars, no episode seems forced or ill-considered. Language, incident, character, mood—the writer's imagination has fused and united them all. The result is whole and complete, a serene, beautiful, and moving book." —Dorothy Greenwald, Boston Transcript

"[Richter] knows the sights and sounds and smells of the time and place: the noise of an Indian cutting shellbark to mend his canoe; the feel of lingering heat in a river rock after the sun has set...The Trees is an authentic portrait of pioneer life, written with strength and beauty." —Horace Reynolds, Christian Science Monitor

"In his new novel,The Trees, Conrad Richter, author ofThe Sea of Grass, has written a moving story of the beginning of the l£L