For some years now we have had among us a top-flight writer working quietly on the story of one family and in a larger sense on the story of this nation's frontier…. Conrad Richter has been steadily piling up a record for solid and distinguished achievement. His writing is distinguished and poetic, both as to character and image. It is intensely atmospheric and backed, in the case of the historical novels, on sound research. Moreover he has the supreme gift of novelists in creating a world of utter reality in which the reader is able to lose himself completely after the first page or two.

"The Town" is a third novel devoted to the fortunes of Sayward Wheeler who as a small girl walked with her family from Pennsylvania into the vast and beautiful forest wilderness that was the Ohio territory. Her first appearance was in "The Trees...