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.