The Free Man

Conrad Richter

Oct 2013 · Sold by Knopf

About this ebook

Henry Free, they called him now, or Frey in the dialect; and they knew him well in all the Pennsylvania land his own Palatine fellow countrymen had settled. They had even sent him to represent them in the Congress at Washington. Captain Free, they said, when they thought how he had fought for the freedom of the colonies a year before the Declaration of Independence. But few of them remembered that he had been Henner Dellicker in the old country, where he was born beside the Neckar; or the tale of his voyage to the new land in the crowded and starved emigrant ship; or of his indentured service in the rich Bayley house in Philadelphia; or of the cruel discipline that Miss Amity visited upon him; or how he fled the King’s jailers to the wild frontier, and returned later to settle his accounts with Miss Amity in a way he had not expected.
 
In this novel, the author of The Trees has written of those early Americans who were among his own forebears—the sturdy, courageous, hard-working, liberty-loving Palatine Germans who with the Alsatians and Swiss came to farm in Pennsylvania and stayed to win their collective freedom on the battlefields of the Revolution. As a footnote to history The Free Man is freshly revealing of an important but unfamiliar aspect of our growth to nationhood and the part played in it by the founding fathers of the Pennsylvania Dutch, their “little Declaration of Independence” as early as April and May 1775, and their introduction and development of that great American influence, the pioneer rifle.

About the author

CONRAD RICHTER was born in Pennsylvania, the son, grandson, nephew, and great-nephew of clergymen. He was intended for the ministry, but at thirteen he declines a scholarship and left preperatory school for high school, from which he graduated at fifteen. After graduation, he went to work. His family on his mother's side was identified with the early American scene, and from boyhood on he was saturated with tales and the color of Eastern pioneer days. In 1928 he and his small family moved to New Mexico, where his heart and mind were soon caputred by the Southwest. From this time on he devoted himself to fiction. The Sea of Grass and The Trees were awarded the gold medal of the Societies of Libraries of New York University in 1942. The Town received the Pulitzer Prize in 1951, and The Waters of Kronos won the 1960 National Book Award for fiction. His other novels included The Fields (1946), The Lady (1957), A Simple Honorable Man (1962), The Grandfathers (1964), A Country of Strangers (1966; a companion to The Light in the Forest), and The Aristocrat, published just before his death in 1968.