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A Study Guide for Conrad Richter's "The Light in the Forest"
A Study Guide for Conrad Richter's "The Light in the Forest"
A Study Guide for Conrad Richter's "The Light in the Forest"
Ebook47 pages34 minutes

A Study Guide for Conrad Richter's "The Light in the Forest"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Conrad Richter's "The Light in the Forest," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 15, 2016
ISBN9781535837958
A Study Guide for Conrad Richter's "The Light in the Forest"

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    A Study Guide for Conrad Richter's "The Light in the Forest" - Gale

    13

    The Light in the Forest

    Conrad Richter

    1953

    Introduction

    The Light in the Forest is a faithfully wrought frontier novel with a stirring plot by mid-twentieth-century American fiction writer Conrad Richter. Although his name is often omitted from lists of the most accomplished novelists of his era, Richter earned critical admiration for the insightfulness and historical accuracy of his tales of life on the frontier in and around his home state of Pennsylvania, as well as in the Southwest. In 1951, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Town, the concluding volume—following The Trees and The Fields—of a trilogy on the advances of early American civilization in Ohio.

    Two years after winning the Pulitzer, Richter wrote what has become his most enduring novel, The Light in the Forest. The tale opens in the mid-eighteenth century with the impending return of True Son, a fifteen-year-old white boy who has been raised in the Ohio wilderness as a Delaware Indian, to the white family and society he feels no affiliation with—and is even repulsed by. As he draws toward his original home and the family he belongs to, the tale explores the comparative merits of Indian and white American civilization. As True Son—now called by his birth name, John Butler—clashes with his family, the book's meditations and action alike intensify. The novel does include secondhand, nongraphic reference to scalping and even more appalling violence. Although Richter wrote the novel for audiences of any age, the focus on the fifteen-year-old protagonist has led to The Light in the Forest's being widely considered a young-adult classic.

    Author Biography

    Conrad Michael Richter was born in Pine Grove, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, on October 13, 1890, the eldest of three sons. Though generally quiet, he possessed a certain restlessness that manifested itself in a plan, enacted at the age of six along with his eight-year-old cousin Henry Irwin, to escape to life among the Indians in the Wild West. But Henry's sister, fearing that the Sioux would torture the boys, exposed and foiled their plan. Richter escaped instead into books, becoming so entranced by fictional worlds that he would finish one book only, dive into another by the same author. While his father went to college and became a minister, Richter attended Susquehanna Preparatory School in Selinsgrove and then high school in Tremont, graduating at age fifteen. Although his parents hoped that he, too, would join the ministry, the young Richter instead cycled through various jobs: teamster, machinist, farmer, bank clerk, timberman, and periodical salesman. In 1910, inspired by an article series, The American Newspaper, he resolved to become a journalist and immediately found a reporting job with the Johnstown Journal.

    Richter proceeded to develop the craft of writing while subsequently working for the Patton Courier, Pittsburgh Dispatch, and Johnstown Leader. He published his first story in 1913 and gained national recognition for a

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