Richter received the Pulitzer Prize for The Town, the third book of the trilogy about American pioneers. The trilogy is mostly told through the point of view of Sayward Luckett, who was fifteen years old when she came to the Northwest Territory with her family in The Trees. She described her first glimpse of where she'd come to live for the rest of her life as an ocean of trees. The trees called to "woodsies" like her father and brother, but for her they were the enemy with whom she was at war, and this installment is about her hard-won victory creating fields of grain that the wind moved like waves on water. The Fields opens in 1803 when she has given birth to her first child and Ohio has just become a state, and this book ends just as the America enters the Civil War.
The Town in some ways is even more powerful than the first two, but it's still my least favorite. It covers the years from the end of her childbearing years and old age. A time when a town has grown up around her--as have her children. A lot of time is given to her youngest Chauncey, and boy did I utterly despise him. He represents the rejection of the pioneer spirit, or the very idea of independence and hard work--that is, the rejection of his mother and everything she built. So the very structure of this book makes it much more melancholy in tone--despite the tragedy and hardship of what had gone before.
I loved the voice of these three short novels. Richter was born in 1890 and knew people who could tell him of the early pioneer days first hand; he talks in his acknowledgements of trying to approximate the speech of the eighteenth and early nineteen century from "old manuscripts, letters, records and other sources, and quite different from the formal written language of the period." The voice he creates is different enough from what we're accustomed to suggest a different time without ever becoming hard to comprehend. And though the trilogy was written from 1940 to 1950, the way he writes women never feels dated. His Sayward came across as very real. I found particularly moving and striking her fierce joy in finally learning to write her own name. All in all I greatly enjoyed this. It's like an adult Little House book, with touches of lyricism, humor, and moving moments.
