Born Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr. in Bedford, IN. Guthrie was considered one of the foremost writers on the American West. His best-known novels, The Big Sky, The Way West, and These Thousand Hills, realistically depicted the taming of the frontier from 1830 to the beginning of the twentieth century. His keen insight into the people who accomplished that task earned high praise from many critics, including Richard Bradford, who asserted in the New York Times Book Review: "Guthrie himself is a marrowdeep American writer, one of the best our country has produced. No one has ever written better of the fibrous men who wrestled a giant land." Born in Indiana, Guthrie moved with his parents to Choteau, Montana when he was only six months old, at a time when Montana was still a frontier. He developed a deep love for the rugged country at an early age, a love that remained strong even during Guthrie's twenty-year stint as a newspaper editor in Lexington, Kentucky. His feelings for his home state and his adopted state merged in his first major novel: The Big Sky relates the story of a young Kentuckian's powerful encounter with the Rocky Mountain frontier. It was immediately popular. Its success enabled Guthrie to leave his position as executive editor of the Lexington Leader and devote himself exclusively to writing. He began working on a sequel to The Big Sky, and in just six months he had completed his story of a wagon train's 1846 journey from Missouri to Oregon. Published as The Way West, the novel possesses the "same imaginative conviction" as The Big Sky but is "a humanly richer and wiser book," according to New York Times Book Review critic Robert Gorham Davis. On the strength of The Way West, Guthrie won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1950. Guthrie's next novel, These Thousand Hills, marks the closing of the frontier and the climax of what Walter Van Tilburg Clark calls in the New York Times Book Review Guthrie's "spiritual epic of the Northeast." Guthrie continued to sketch the evolution of the West in his later novels, with The Last Valley concluding shortly after World War II. Guthrie consistently won praise for his awareness of both the dream and the reality of the American West. His novels celebrate the grandeur of the wilderness, but at the same time, "the brutality and the plain squalor of life in the early West come through," wrote Nation contributor Margaret Marshall. Stylistically, he "shuns romanticism, preferring a kind of dramatic reportage told in language which is clean, informal, and direct," noted John R. Milton in The Novel of the American West. J. M. Lalley described Guthrie's prose in less favorable terms in a New Yorker review, calling it "a sort of sturdy buckskin dialect lavishly embellished with poetical fofaraw." But New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher found Guthrie's style perfectly suited to his subject; in her opinion, it was "sober, simple American, natural and unselfconscious... The author looks at the reader out of clear, honest, truth-telling eyes and says what he has to say, without uneasiness, without heroics." Guthrie's work was "grounded on his respect for research and facts, a virtue which even his harshest critics seem to grant," noted Thomas W. Ford, author of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. "Along with regard for the facts [is] his equally important desire to suggest the spiritual qualities of the [Western] movement, and his use of landscape, sky, and space [become] the primary implement for suggesting these qualities. In these ways, Guthrie is the Western realist who treats the physical and historical West plus the idea of the West and moves between fact and dream." The author moved back to Montana shortly after the success of The Big Sky, and lived in a house he built near his childhood home. He told an interviewer, "I've always thought of Montana as my center of the universe."  Nominated for Writing (Screenplay) 1953: SHANE 1 nomination