Conrad Richter, The Waters of Kronos. University Park PA: Penn State University Press, 2003. Pp. 176, $16.95
When Conrad Richter published The Waters of Kronos in 1960, he was sixty-nine years old and contemplating the swift approach of three score and ten, a significant phrase for the son of a minister and a writer shaped by the language of the Authorized King James Version. He had left Pine Grove in Schuykill County, Pennsylvania, when he was twenty years old. He lived a productive life as a writer in Ohio and New Mexico, then returned to his hometown for the last eighteen years of his life, dying in 1968. Among many honors were a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for The Town, the culminating novel of his Ohio frontier trilogy, and a National Book Award in 1961 for The Waters of Kronos.
Although he resided away from Pennsylvania for the middle third of his life, the land and the people abided within him. Seven novels were set here, and others had strong connections to the state. Thirty-five years after his death, a fair representation of his work remains in print: his first novel, The Sea of Grass; the Ohio trilogy, known collectively as The Awakening Land; the Indian captivity novel, A Light in the Forest, once a Disney movie and still taught in area schools; A Free Man, the rags to riches story about a German Lutheran immigrant getting caught up in the American Revolution; and, reprinted the summer of 2003, The Waters of Kronos.
This novel appeals to anyone interested in Pennsylvania history because it is a true and thoughtful consideration of a small town and its people in the valley and ridge central part of the state. Richter delivers with loving yet analytical detail the Pennsylvania Dutch (and one notable Scots-Irishman), the miners, the merchants, the ministers, and the families of a slightly disguised Pine Grove circa 1900. The story is set in an allegorical framework (the waters of time) that echoes wonderfully in the reader's mind and only improves with rereading and reflection.
Arthur P. Miller, Jr., and Marjorie L. Miller, Guide to the Homes of Famous Pennsylvanians: Houses, Museums, and Landmarks. Mechanicsburg PA: Stackpole Books, 2003. Photos, 224pp., $18.95.