The following biographical sketch appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 May 1951:
CONRAD RICHTER
All of Conrad Richter‘s books stem from his experiences as a boy in the little town of Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, where he was born on October 13, 1890. His family had strong ties there. His great-grandfather was an officer in the War of 1812 and had kept a tavern and store in Pine Grove. His father was a preacher there. The town of his boyhood typifies to him the close of an age in which “my grandfather still wore his stovepipe hat, when the public could still be damned and everybody be his natural, individualistic self, so refreshingly different from his neighbor.”
At the age of six, he plotted to escape to the west , with a young cousin, but the plot was tipped by his cousin’s sister. At 15, he finished high school and went to work, driving teams, pitching hay, cutting timber and clerking in a bank, his first really important jobs were reporting on the Johnstown Journal (Pennsylvania), and editing, at 19, the Patton Courier (Pennsylvania).
Later he became a private secretary in Cleveland and sold his first fiction story there. He wrote children’s stories for the John Martin’s book and launched a children’s magazine of his own called the Junior Magazine Book. Using a dozen pen names, he wrote everything in each issue, including the verse and the advertisements.
He married Harvena Achenbach, of his native Pine Grove, During the late 1920s, he sold his business and, with his wife and their young child, went west to New Mexico. They have lived there ever sense.
His first five years out west were spent collecting source material. Richter is a thorough literary workman who spends months patiently digging through old newspapers and diaries for the facts he needs in his stories. However, he disclaims any attempt at writing historical fiction. Instead, he says he tried to give his readers the feel of a region during some particular time.
Other books in his trilogy, with The Town are The Trees and The Field. His other books include such stories as The Sea of Grass and Always Young and Fair.
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News article from Newspapers.com.
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