In 1991, the year of his death, A. B. Guthrie Jr. received the tribute of having his first major novel, The Big Sky (1947), chosen as the best novel of the American West in a poll of the members of the Western Literature Association. Just as The Big...

Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr., is best known for his writing about the American West. His three most famous novels--sometimes referred to together as a trilogy--cover the eventful decades between 1830 and 1890, vividly depicting the lives of Americans...

Like Mr. Guthrie's two previous volumes, "The Big Sky," a magnificently pictorial account of the mountain-man era, and the steadily moving "The Way West," which told of the Oregon Trail, "These Thousand Hills" is spaciously conceived and closely thought out. With it, Mr. Guthrie puts beyond question what many of his readers had already guessed, that he is working deliberately and with foresight within the larger intention of depicting the opening and developm...

[The one unfailing link that joins The Big Sky, The Way West, These Thousand Hills, Arfive and The Lost Valley] is Guthrie's insistent use of the Western landscape as the distinguishing mark of the West, as the very heart and soul and body of whatever the West means. All the complexities and contradictions of the Western experience are finally seen in and judged by the interaction of characters and the landscape—that landscape which includes the earth, sky, space. And just as the idea of the W...

To get to the point at once, with a bluntness that I hope contains an element of mercy; The Last Valley, A. B. Guthrie's fifth and, he says, probably final novel about America's westering, is a near-total disaster as a work of fiction. (It is an extremely interesting sociological document, however, a point to which I shall return in a moment.) One can scarcely believe that the man who wrote The Big Sky and The Way West is responsible for it. Guthrie seems to have forgotten everything he once s...