His novel The Town (1950), the last story of his trilogy The Awakening Land about the Ohio frontier, won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Coming from a long line of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors,[3] his grandfather, uncle and great-uncle were also Lutheran ministers, and descended from German colonial immigrants.

Richter worked subsequently for a small publishing company, initiated a juvenile magazine, and started writing short stories.

Richter's novel The Light in the Forest (1953), set in late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and Ohio, featured challenges faced by a young white man who had become an assimilated Lenape Amerindian after being taken captive as a child.

He wrote of Richter, He simply tells how he thinks things were for both Indians and whites, in a hard time of violence and danger and change on a raw frontier.

[4]During this period, Richter also published the novels of his trilogy The Awakening Land, about the Ohio frontier: The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950).

[1] In a review of the last novel, Louis Bromfield, also an Ohio writer and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote of the trilogy: the three books are not only concerned with Sayward and her family but the growth and the astonishingly rapid development of a whole area which has played a key role in the nation's history… Mr. Richter has reproduced the quality and the speech of these people so well that a thousand years from now, one may read his books and know exactly what these people were like and what it was like to have lived in an era when within three or four generations a frontier wilderness turned into one of the great industrial areas of the earth….

'The Town' stands on its own as an entity and may be read on its own as a full, rich and comprehensive novel based upon the lives of ordinary people, brave and ever heroic in their own small way...[4] The trilogy was first published in one volume in 1966 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Richter's short story, "Doctor Hanray's Second Chance", first published in the magazine The Saturday Evening Post in 1950 (June 10),[11] has a theme of reconciling with the past.

[11] The Internet Speculative Fiction Database catalogs five of Richter's stories, including a very early one, "The Head of His House", from a 1917 anthology, The Grim Thirteen (Dodd, Mead).

When The Waters of Kronos was reissued in paperback format in 2003, one reviewer wrote, To celebrate the reappearance of such a worthy novel may be an expression of regional patriotism, but it should also be an opportunity to think about our own small towns, our own haunted memories, and our own quest for the meaning of the past.The Sea of Grass, The Trees and Tacey Cromwell were published as Armed Services Editions during WWII.