The Town

Written by Conrad Richter

Narrated by Danny Campbell

The Awakening Land trilogy traces the transformation of a middle-American landscape from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character. The trilogy earned author Conrad Richter immense acclaim, ranking him with the greatest of American mid-century novelists. It includes The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950) and follows the varied fortunes of Sayward Luckett and her family in southeastern Ohio.



The Town, the longest novel of the trilogy, won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize and received excellent reviews across the country. It tells how Sayward completes her mission and lives to see the transition of her family and her friends, American pioneers, from the ways of wilderness to the ways of civilization. Here is the tumultuous story of how the Lucketts grow to face the turmoil of the first half of the nineteenth century. The Town is a much bigger book than either of its predecessors, and with them comprises a great American epic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781541431973

Reviews for The Town

[Judy Bauer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When I read this as a teenager I thought it was just a good read, now in my 70's I can see why it won the Pulitzer.

[Karen Neuendorf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A true and essential philosophy of life that all should hear repeatedly as we walk through a dangerous time in our history right now.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reason read: Pulitzer list.
This one was the winner in 1951. It is the last of his The Awakening Land trilogy and no I did not read the first two. It was not a problem as far as I know. It tells the story of a very strong pioneer woman by the name of Sayward who lives a long life, seeing the tradition of family and friends and her town from wilderness to civilization. It is set in the first half of the nineteenth century. I especially liked Sayward as an old lady. I really hate this cover. I listened to the audio read by Danny Campbell. His voice was okay and seem to fit the era.

[kslade-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Good conclusion but kind of an unexpected focus on Chancey, the last son of Sayward. I put off reading this trilogy for many years. Should have read it sooner. Worthwhile.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When we rejoin Sayward she is in her late forties and has given birth to ten children. Nine have survived. She is witness to the transformation of the wilderness into a civilized community but she can remember when she started her young life in the deep woods of Ohio with trees all around. In awe she watches as the necessities of a communal existence blossom into a church, school, meeting house, and grist mill. The canal becomes a focal point as brick structures replace wooden ones. She can remember when it all started - her family looking to stave off hunger by pushing west in the hopes of cultivating richer soils into bountiful gardens. The Trees told of isolation while The Fields saw settlements encroaching on the family's privacy until finally they realized the need for one another was a good thing and the Town is born.
Even though most of Sayward's children are grown with families of their own, in The Town the reader spends the majority of time with Sayward's youngest child, Chancey. He is a strange child, afraid of everything; paranoid and preferring to be alone. He is so dissimilar to his siblings he strongly believes he is adopted. His failure to understand any member of his family is borderline obsessive. When meeting strangers he even gives them a false name. His claims his weak heart doesn't allow him to walk very far. Soon a dark family secret turns out to be his greatest heartbreak.

[fuzzi_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Town concludes the saga of the Luckett/Wheeler family, as Sayward ages, her children grow up (sometimes), and the society changes as well. Poignant, moving, and a good follow-up to the other Awakening Land books.

[cheriedooryard · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was not nearly as compelling as the first book, not even as compelling as the second, but I'm still very glad I read it. If you want to learn about what it felt to be the last of the pioneering generation, if you want to discover one of the most compelling characters in American fiction, this whole trilogy is worth the read.

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.