"She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs, / But I was young and foolish"

[larryhammer]

All knowledge is contained et cet.:

I'm trying to identify a book series I read as a youngster.

I believe, but am not positive, that it had four volumes, and that each had a short, possibly one-word title. They were the story of a family of homesteaders on the early American frontier, following a couple from first settling to old age, when the place they'd settled had grown into a prosperous town. PBS aired a multi-episode adaptation in the late 1970s or thereabouts, which I saw before finding the books (which I liked, despite much going over my head, because I was on a colonial/early republic frontier kick). The only plot-specific detail I remember is that the husband, early on, had an affair with one of their first neighbors, and in a later volume one of the sons was forced, with much angst, to stop courting a young woman because she was actually his half-sister by that affair.

Anyone have any idea about the titles/author?

---L.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

This sounds very familiar, not from my own reading experience, but from hearing about Am Lit. Could it be The Awakening Land trilogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awakening_Land_trilogy) (not teratology, but… ) by Conrad Richter? It seems like it fits, and the titles are single word (well, double-word if you count "the")

[larryhammer]

That looks very, very likely ...

---L.