The Fields

One of 3 novels about Sayward and Portius Wheeler, the family they raise, and the taming of the Ohio wilderness where they settled

"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
"A simple, poetic and touching story of how the frontier was built." New Republic
"Conrad Richter, one of the distinguished story-tellers of our time, comes forward with another superlatively readable novel. . . . It is one of those unusual historical novels in which deep study and understanding are evident on every page, but in which men and women are so truly flesh and blood that one happily forgets they are historical." Alfred Butterfield, New York Times
"It is good to have a writer like Mr. Richter remind us movingly, but without sentimentality of the hard core of character in the men and women who made this country." New Yorker
"What gives the book its very special flavor is its style, a speech approximating the store of eighteenth and nineteenth century speech collected by the author from old manuscripts letters, records, and other sources. By the skillful use of this device, the author has succeeded in making the reader see, feel, and think in the language of the characters of his book. In general, this is a sensitive re-creation of a passage in our history." US Quarterly Booklist
"I doubt that anyone writing today in this country is closer in understanding and treatment of pioneer llife than Conrad Richter. . . . He has that gift the first and most important in a novelist of creating for the reader a world as real as the one in which he lives, a world which the reader enters on reading the first page and in which he remains until the last." Louis Bromfield, Weekly Book Review
"A truly distinguished [book]... This is a sequel to The Treesof blessed memory, and it is an equally amazing re-creation of the life and speech and thought of the American frontier wilderness 140 years ago. In a series of seperate episodes, each a complete unit of intself, Mr. Richter has shown through the life of one family the transformation of a hunting society into a farming one. . . . He has told a wise and deeply moving story about a woman who is almost great in her simple strength of character. Seldom in fiction has the atmosphere of another age been so completely realized. Part of the magical spell of Mr. Richter's book is cast directly by the prose, which makes loving and unpretentious use of the vocabulary and typical turns of phrase of its characters. A rare and haunting book is this, which on no account should be overlooked." Orville Prescott, Yale Review
"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." Louis Bromfield
There are in the literature of the world few works of historical fiction that make the reader feel that the writer must have been a witness to what he describes; he was actually there and came back a transmigrated soul to tell a story. The Awakening Land is such a work . . . it would be a great novel in any literature. Isaac Bashevis Singer "

-The novel is an accurate, deeply understood picture of early Ohio.- --Sterling North, Book Week
"The novel is an accurate, deeply understood picture of early Ohio." --Sterling North, Book Week