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 Trees is the story of an American family in the wilderness—a family that
"followed the woods as some families follow the sea." The time is the end of the
eighteenth century, the wilderness is the