From the time of its first publication in 1960, Conrad Richter's The Waters of Kronos sparked lively debate about the extent to which its story of a belated return to childhood scenes mirrored key events of Richter's own life. As was well known at the time, Richter had spent several years in the Southwest, where he collected the material for his first successful book, Early Americans and Other Stories, but by 1933, he had returned to live in his hometown, Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. John Donner, the main protagonist in The Waters of Kronos, traces a similar route from west to east, although he finds that his family home and native town have been submerged under the deep waters of a lake formed by the construction of a hydroelectric dam. As Richter narrates his alter ego's efforts to salvage his past, he moves beyond 'semi-autobiography' to offer what are widely recognized as his most haunting reflections upon the power of family history, the fragility of human memory, and art's role in structuring the communal ethos. David McCullough, a fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, met and befriended Richter in the 1960s and has called him 'an American master,' praising The Waters of Kronos as 'his most beautiful book.' McCullough has contributed a foreword to this edition of The Waters of Kronos, which established Richter as one of the literary giants of the United States.
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The Waters of Kronos is an enchanted book. It reminds us anew of the magic which the printed page may hold, what we thought in a more innocent time as the spell and transport which the craftsmen of words may create. --New York Herald Tribune
Writers as various as Marcel Proust, Thomas Wolfe, and James Thurber separately discovered that 'you can't go home again.' In The Waters of Kronos, novelist Conrad Richter adds an extra dimension to this truism. His hero grasps what countless other men have sensed: you can never really leave home. --Time
May it never go out of print again. It is an extraordinary book, the kind that could only have been written by someone for whom the techniques of storytelling had become second nature. --Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer
Writers as various as Marcel Proust, Thomas Wolfe, and James Thurber separately discovered that 'you can't go home again.' In The Waters of Kronos, novelist Conrad Richter adds an extra dimension to this truism. His hero grasps what countless other men have sensed: you can never really leave home. --Time
May it never go out of print again. It is an extraordinary book, the kind that could only have been written by someone for whom the techniques of storytelling had become second nature. --Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer
About the Author
Conrad Richter (1890-1968) was awarded the National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos in 1961. He was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Town, the last volume in a trilogy about frontier life in Ohio, in 1951.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Waters of Kronos,
This review is from: The Waters of Kronos (Hardcover)
In this haunting, often beautiful novel, Conrad Richter writes of the journey of John Donner, who goes back to the town where he was born, hoping to find the meaning of a deep malaise. If he can only return to the past, he feels he might be free. But the quest seems futile. The town he seeks lies at the bottom of a great modern dam made by the River Kronos.
How he is drawn back through the waters of Kronos, Time, into the past forms the narrative of John Donner's classic journey. He finds himself in his own clear, light-filled world of youth at a moment of double crisis in the lives of his richly varied family, the Donners, Morgans, and Scarletts. But they are still young. John Donner is an old man. When he tries to re-enter the old intimate family relationships, he is rejected as a stranger, even by the boy-he-was as they stand face to face. Only his mother, from whom he holds himself until the last, cannot fail him, he thinks. Surely she will know him and receive him into the old heretofore never failing love.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lost classic,
By Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Waters of Kronos (Paperback)
The Waters of Kronos is a haunting novel about memory, loss, nostalgia, and the pitfalls of hope. The very premise, so promisingly delivered, bears fruit in unexpected ways: John Donner imagines that his inner unease is from the distance between him and his long dead father. In his feverish imagination he sees his father menacingly approaching his sick bed, but then realizes he was wrong. His father was not the subject of his life long fear: it was existence itself. The very physical fact of living, with its accumulated disappointments and losses, its fears and anxieties, is the real source of anxiety. And it is inescapable: neither a retreat into fantasy nor a recreation of the past into art can alleviate it. In the end, this masterfully written novella comes to grips with this unsettling fact: people must live with life as it is given.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterpiece,
By
This review is from: The Waters of Kronos (Paperback)
This book by Richter which won the National Book Award in 1961 remains for me THE masterpiece of modern American literature.
Elegaic in its scope, Richter in Waters of Kronos captures the nostalgic malaise of the dwindling Eisenhower years as the American Spirit fails to come to terms with the realization that our rural Americanness of closely knit families, hidden local secrets, and apple pie abundance had been forfeited under the swelling waters of Modern Time -- those backed-up waters created by the dams of the Tennessee valley and the creation of the interstate highway system. In raising this awareness in the novella-like dreams of a man affected by the stroke of insight, Richter juxaposes the era of headless horsemen and settling pilgrims with the impersonal modern existentialism that arbitrarily guards the cemetaries of our memories. If there is any book of American literature that should be mandatory reading, this is the one.
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