"It was a fine country to grow up in. To find riches, a boy had only to go outside," writes A. B. Guthrie, Jr., aobut his childhood in Montana early in the twentieth century. This autobiography was originally published in 1965 when he was sixty-four and still had miles to go. It recounts lively adventures and reflects on a career that brought fame for The Big Sky (1947) and led to the Pulitzer Prize for The Way West (1949). In an afterword David Petersen, who edited Big Sky, Fair The Environmental Essays of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1988), describes the last twenty-five years of Guthrie's life. The world-famous author died in 1991 at the age of ninety.
Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr. was an American novelist, screenwriter, historian, and literary historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction during 1950 for his novel The Way West.
After working 22 years as a news reporter and editor for the Lexington Leader, Guthrie wrote his first novel.
Ηe was able to quit his reporting job after the publication of the novels The Big Sky and The Way West (1950 Pulitzer Prize).
Guthrie died during 1991, at age 90, at his ranch near Choteau.