The Fields

Conrad Richter’s trilogy of novels The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950) trace the transformation of Ohio from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character.

The Fields continues the saga of the Luckett family that began in The Trees. In The Fields, the oldest daughter, Sayward, has begun the long process of carving a small farm out of the forest. She bears eight children and weathers numerous challenges in this novel, which gives an excellent sense of what pioneer life was really like.The trilogy earned Richter immediate acclaim as a historical novelist. The Town won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1951, and The Trees was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection after it was published. Richter also received the 1947 Ohioan Library Medal for the first two volumes of the trilogy.