Tacey Cromwell

Conrad Richter (1890 - 1968) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1951 for the concluding volume of his "Awakening Land" trilogy (The Trees, The Fields, The Town). His first novel, The Sea of Grass (1937) was made into a not-very-good studio-shot movie by Elia Kazan in 1947, starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Robert Walker. His 1953 book The Light in the Forest was popular with juvenile male readers during the 1950s and early 1960s (and was a popular Disney movie starring James MacArthur and Jessica Tandy in 1958), but Richter seems a largely forgotten writer, more so that Wright Morris (an award-winning writer about the Great Plains who never produced a best-seller), and much so that Willa Cather (regarded as the great Great Plains novelist) His 1942 novel (Richter's second) Tacey Cromwell begins with an orphaned boy running away from a very harsh eastern Kansas home of one uncle with a dog from another uncle, some time in the 1890s or 1900s. The dog does not make it out of Kansas, but the boy ("Nugget") finds the half-brother (Gaye Oldaker) whom he has never seen in Socorro, a New Mexico silver-mining boom town, where he is a dealer in the casino part of the town's best bordello, the White Palace, and living with the title character, the bordello's proprietor. Together they move to Brewery Gulch in the copper-mining town of Bisbee, Arizona. The narrator recalls with anguish the "respectable" townswomen getting the two children Tacey was raising taken away and her difficult life as his own was eased by his brother marrying into the local elite (following Tacey's directions even about whom to marry). I think his de facto "sister," Seely, is rather stereotyped (a tomboy with bad genes), but Tacey is a very interesting character and the caste-like line between the "quality" folk and the irredeemably outcast that men might cross but women could not was skillfully dramatized by Richter. The novel was filmed in 1955 as "One Desire" starring Anne Baxter, Rock Hudson, and Natalie Wood. The "one desire" was to escape the circa-1900 stigma of a scarlet letter. (And yes, that novel about an earlier American frontier's intolerance hovers over Richter's novel).