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  • Conrad Richter: A Writer's Life is the story of an aspiring writer who failed and then, desperate for money, tried again and wrote himself out of penny-a-word pulp magazines and into a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Based upon unrestricted access to all of Richter's letters, journals, notebooks, and private papers, this biography offers an intimate account of Richter's personal struggle to achieve success on his own and in other people's terms.Born and raised in the small Pennsylvania town of Pine Grove, Conrad Richter is best known for his books The Sea of Grass, The Trees, and The Light in the Forest. David Johnson introduces us to the public self Richter carefully prepared for the world, whether stepping from his porch onto Pine Grove sidewalks, or negotiating the worlds of New York publishing and Hollywood film studios. He also offers an intimate view of an exceptionally private man, insecure and self-punishing, who seldom revealed his inner self even to those closest to him.The interior view of the man and the writer is available because of the personal journal Richter kept from 1925 to 1968, a record of all that was important to him. In it there are his accounts of his daily writing, vividly described, and his worries about his agent, his publisher, his wife, and his daughter -- upon whom he projected his anxieties about himself. Here Richter records his agony as his wife slips toward death just as the stock market crash of 1929 takes all his money. Here too are Richter's elaborate superstitions and his own theories (psycho-energics, he called them) about the meaning of life and about an afterlife in the "astral", about reincarnation, and about spirit guides whointerpose occasionally, sending signs if one could only decipher them.