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 grandfather, uncle and great-uncle were also Lutheran ministers, and descended from German colonial immigrants. As a child, Richter lived with his family in several small central Pennsylvania mining towns, where he encountered descendants of pioneers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who shared family stories. These inspired him later to write historical fiction set in changing American frontiers. Attending local public schools, Richter finished his formal education when he graduated from high school at age fifteen.
Early career, marriage and move to New Mexico
At the age of 19, Richter started working as an editor of a local weekly newspaper, the Patton, Pennsylvania, Courier. In 1911 Richter relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, and worked as the private secretary to a wealthy manufacturing family. Richter married Harvena Maria Achenbach in 1915. They had their only child, Harvena Richter, in 1917. Richter worked subsequently for a small publishing company, initiated a juvenile magazine, and started writing short stories. During the 1930s, he also performed two brief stints as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in Hollywood, California. His short story "Brothers of No Kin," published in Forum magazine in 1914, This short story was re-issued as the title story of a posthumous collection published in 1973.
In 1928 Richter relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the sake of his wife's health. During this period, he also collected much material from which he created short stories about the Southwest frontier days. By 1933, Richter and his wife had returned to live in his hometown of Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. They subsequently alternated between Pine Grove, Albuquerque, and Florida.
Writing career
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. In a review of the last novel, Louis Bromfield, also an Ohio writer and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote of the trilogy:
<blockquote>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 short story "Doctor Hanray" was republished in the anthology, The Saturday Evening Post Fantasy Stories (1951) and in several later speculative fiction anthologies published by the Post and others.
After Richter's death, two short story collections were published posthumously. Additionally, several of his novels have been reissued by academic presses. When The Waters of Kronos was reissued in paperback format in 2003, one reviewer wrote,