The impact of the two World Wars on novelists of the last several decades has perhaps minimized the role of folklore either as central or as contributory in recent American fiction. But there is one … novelist who has employed folklore so frequently and so richly that it is surprising that no critic has previously pointed it out. I speak of Conrad Richter, the author of a trilogy of novels about the settlement of the old Northwest Territory….

Richter's fiction is not limited to this trilogy…. [In] his The Sea of Grass he achieved a memorable tale of the southwest ranching area which for sensitivity of style and subtle feeling for background rivals Willa Cather's more famous Death Comes for the Archbishop. In several of the short stories collected in the volume appropriately entitled Early Americana Richter also used various folklore themes, but such material is more apparent in...