Guthrie, A(lfred) B(ertram), Jr.

(b. 13 January 1901 in Bedford, Indiana; d. 26 April 1991 near Choteau, Montana), novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet widely acclaimed for his writing on the American West, best known for The Big Sky (1947), the finest novel written about the mountain man.

Guthrie moved with his family to the small ranch town of Choteau, Montana, when he was six months old, his father taking a job as principal of the Teton County High School. Both of Guthrie’s parents were highly educated by the standards of the time: his father, Alfred Bertram Guthrie, graduated from Indiana University at Bloomington, while his mother, June Thomas, a homemaker, graduated from Earlham College, a Quaker school at Richmond, Indiana. The high plains country on the eastern slope of the Rockies, where Guthrie enjoyed hunting and fishing, remained his center of the universe, even though he might be as far away as Kentucky or Massachusetts. This love for the West became the focal point in his writing, and is also reflected in his lifelong concern with protecting the environment.

Guthrie was the third of nine children, six of whom died at very early ages. Although reared in the rather rigid fundamentalism of the frontier Methodist Church, after graduation from college Guthrie rejected his religious background and adopted a kind of pantheistic view of deity in nature.

In 1915 Guthrie began a summer job as printer’s devil with the weekly Choteau Acantha, a newspaper his father had briefly owned. He also played on the high school basketball team and pitched for the town baseball team in summers. Graduating from Teton County Free High School in 1919, he enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle. Unhappy with the gray skies of Seattle, the next year he transferred to the University of Montana at Missoula, where he was much happier. There he joined a fraternity, became its president, majored in journalism, and graduated with honors in 1923. Jobs were scarce, and Guthrie took temporary work wherever he could find it, in Montana, Mexico, California, and New York. Then, in July 1926, he obtained a job as cub reporter with the Lexington (Kentucky) Leader, an association that lasted twenty-one years, with Guthrie moving through the ranks of reporter, editorial writer, city editor, managing editor, and finally executive editor.

On 25 June 1931 he married Harriet Helen Larson, whom he had known since childhood in Choteau. They had two children. Guthrie wrote his first novel in 1936. A combination mystery and cowboy story, it was, by Guthrie’s own admission, a contender for the worst novel ever written. But it was a beginning, and eventually it was published as Murders at Moon Dance (1943).

Guthrie’s major contribution to literature was to be a series of six novels treating the opening, settlement, and development of the West. After the publication of Murders at Moon Dance, Guthrie made a brief beginning on The Big Sky, the first novel in the series. He wanted to write a novel about the rise and fall of the fur trapper, the mountain man, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Feeling that no novel had treated this period in American history truthfully, Guthrie wanted to base his portrait on actual documents of the time. After three chapters, however, he realized he was not creating what he wanted, and set the work aside. A major turning point in his life came in 1944, when he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship, a program instituted to provide journalists a free year of unrestricted study at Harvard University. While in Cambridge he completed two-fifths of the manuscript under the direction of Professor Theodore Morrison. Concluding his work at Harvard, he was granted a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, and there in August 1945, publisher William Sloane read the manuscript and offered Guthrie a $5,000 advance. Returning to the Leader, Guthrie completed his manuscript in off-hours, and The Big Sky was published in 1947. That same year he resigned from the Leader to devote himself full time to his writing.

The Big Sky received both critical and popular acclaim, and Guthrie was an overnight success. Most major reviews gave near-lavish praise, and Guthrie’s picture was on the cover of the Saturday Review of Literature. The book centers on three main characters, all mountain men: Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers, between the years 1830 and 1843. All contribute to the destruction of the beaver, eventually depriving the trapper of a livelihood. This expressed Guthrie’s theme that “each man kills the thing he loves.” The second novel in the series, The Way West (1949), is about a wagon train of settlers moving from Missouri to Oregon in 1845. Dick Summers reappears as the scout and guide for the wagon train. It became a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, and in May 1950 Guthrie received the Pulitzer Prize for this novel.

Although the remaining novels in this series did not receive the acclaim of the first two, Guthrie continued to be regarded as one of America’s premier western novelists. These Thousand Hills (1956), a story of cattle ranching in Montana in the 1880s, was criticized for its predictable and melodramatic plot. Still, Twentieth Century-Fox purchased movie rights for $100,000. These first three novels of the series were made into movies, but Guthrie did not feel that they accurately conveyed his intentions. Arfive (1971), perhaps the most autobiographical of the novels, deals with life in a small Montana town from the turn of the twentieth century to World War I. The central character, Benton Collingsworth, a school principal, closely resembles Guthrie’s father. The Last Valley (1975) continues the Arfive story, focusing on the problems of a small-town newspaperman from about 1920 to 1940. Fair Land, Fair Land (1982) is the last of the series. It goes back to earlier times, treating roughly the years from 1845 to 1870, which were omitted between The Way West and These ThousandHills. The story centers on Dick Summers, and is a requiem for the fate of the mountain man as his life comes to a close.

In addition to this series of novels, Guthrie wrote numerous newspaper editorials and magazine articles. He also authored other books: The Big It (1960), a collection of short stories; The Blue Hen’s Chicly (1965), an autobiography; Once Upon a Pond (1973), animal fables for children; Wild Pitch (1973), The Genuine Article (1977), No Second Wind (1980), and Playing Catch-Up (1985), murder mysteries set in a small Montana town; Four Miles From Ear Mountain (1987), a book of poems; Big Sky, Fair Land: The Environmental Essays of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1988), a collection of socio-environmental essays; Murder in the Cotswolds (1989), a murder mystery set in England; and^4 Field Guide to Writing Fiction (1991). In 1949 Guthrie was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature by the University of Montana and in 1951 he went to Hollywood to write the screenplay for Shane (1953), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. In 1953 the Guthries sold their home in Lexington and returned to Montana. By mutual agreement, Guthrie and his wife divorced in 1962, but he remembered his married life with fondness.

On 3 April 1969, Guthrie married Carol Bischman Luthin. The marriage was a happy one, with his wife inspiring him to be productive. On rugged land twenty-five miles northwest of Choteau, they constructed their year-round home, which they fondly called The Barn because the outside of the structure was modeled after the actual barn on the property of the home in Choteau where Guthrie had spent his childhood. The Teton River ran through his land and from his window he could see Ear Mountain; both of these landmarks made frequent appearances in his writing. In 1972 he was given the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award. In 1977 he received a doctorate of literature from Montana State University. He continued to write and publish until his death. He succumbed to lung failure at his home at the age of ninety. As he had requested, his body was cremated and his ashes were scattered over Ear Mountain and the land nearby.

Guthrie’s six novels on the opening and development of the West established his reputation as one of America’s foremost western novelists. Perhaps his major talent was his ability to evoke poetically the epic sweep and spiritual qualities of the western land without forsaking realistic details and historical accuracy.

Collections of Guthrie’s manuscripts and personal papers are in the Margaret I. King Library at the University of Kentucky and in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Guthrie’s autobiography, The Blue Hen’s Chicly (1965), is packed with personal anecdotes and information up to the early 1960s. Thomas W. Ford, A.B. Guthrie, Jr. (1981), is a book-length biographical-critical study of Guthrie. John R. Milton, “The Historical Inheritance: Guthrie and Manfred,” in Milton’s The Novel of the American West (1980), discusses the first five of Guthrie’s novels on the American West. Fred Erisman, “A. B. Guthrie, Jr.,” in Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook (1982), edited by Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain, includes a brief biographical sketch. Wayne Chatterton, “A. B. Guthrie, Jr.,” in A Literary History of the American West (1987), edited by J. Golden Taylor et al., is a biographical-critical essay. David Petersen, “The Evolution and Expression of Environmental Themes in the Life and Literature of A. B. Guthrie, Jr.,” in his Big Sky, Fair Land: The Environmental Essays of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1988), discusses Guthrie’s lifelong concern with environmental issues. Richard W. Etulain and N. Jill Howard, “A. B. Guthrie, Jr.,” in their A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature (2d ed., 1995), lists secondary sources about Guthrie. Martin Kich, “A. B. Guthrie, Jr.,” Western American Novelists, vol. 1 (1995), is a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. David Petersen, “A. B. Guthrie, Jr.: A Remembrance,” in Updating the Literary West (1997), edited by Thomas J. Lyon, et al., is a reflection on some events in Guthrie’s life after his marriage to Carol Luthin in 1969. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Houston Chronicle (both 27 Apr. 1991). A television documentary, “A. B. Guthrie’s Vanishing Paradise,” funded in part by the Montana Committee for the Humanities, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, aired on PBS in 1985. The program, available on videocassette, features interviews with Guthrie, and comments by critic Thomas W. Ford.

Thomas W. Ford