Conrad Richter was born in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, in 1890 and finished his formal education with high school at age fifteen. He wrote lyrical fiction about frontier life in different periods of American history.
The Awakening Land trilogy consists of The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946) and The Town (1950). The Town won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and The Waters of Kronos won the 1961 National Book Award for Fiction. He died in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1968.