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Chicago Review Press
November 2017
On Sale: November 1, 2017
320 pages
ISBN: 1613737416
EAN: 9781613737415
Kindle: B00F8FA29Q
Trade Size / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
“They moved along in the bobbing, springy gait of a
family that followed the woods as some families follow
the sea.” In that first sentence Conrad Richter sets the
mood of this magnificent epic of the American wilderness.
Toward the close of the eighteenth century the land west
of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio river was an
unbroken sea of trees. Beneath them the forest trails
were dark, silent, and lonely, brightened only by a few
lost beams of sunlight. Here the Lucketts, a wild,
woodsfaring family, lived their roaming life, pushing
ever westward as the frontier advanced and as new
settlements threatened their isolation.
Richter has written, not a historical novel, of which
there are so many, but a novel of authentic early
American life, of which there are so few. It is the
primitive story of Worth Luckett, the hunter, and of
Jary, his woman; of Genny, Wyitt, Achsa, and Sulie, their
woods-wild children; of the bound boy and the Solitary
and Jake Tench; but principally of the oldest girl,
Sayward Luckett, whos people as far back as she knew had
always been hunters and gunsmiths to hunters, but who,
through the quiet, growing, and yet tragic oppression of
the trees, turns her back at last on her life as a
hunter’s child and becomes a tiller of the soil.
This novel of great lyrical beauty and high excitement
tells the story of the transition of American pioneers
from the ways of the wilderness to the ways of
civilization. Here is the true American epic. Here is the
raw adventure, swift and cruel in its episodes; but here
too is the poetry of loneliness. Here is a portrait of
frontier life as it really must have seemed to the
pioneers. Here in short is a masterpiece by the man who
gave us The Sea of Grass.
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