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...

Even more successfully than its predecessor, "The Big Sky." Mr. Guthrie's ["The Way West"] repossesses the past and gives a sense, not of fiction, but of the Western experience itself as it was totally known a hundred years ago by the men who underwent it, who chose it, and who were re-created by it as Western Americans. Mr. Guthrie writes with modest but sure art, especially in his feeling for the idiom of Western talk and for the narrative style proper to it. In so far a...

One of the finest collections of short stories in recent years is A. B. Guthrie, Jr.'s "The Big It." This excellent book is not an assortment of "Western" stories, as the publishers have implied, for Guthrie is no more a "Western" writer than Melville was an Eastern writer or Hemingway a Spanish writer. True, the West provides the locale, but what a difference between these tales and those of Zane Grey and the host of TV scriptwriters! Guthrie's storie...

There is sentiment, there is indeed a bushel of corn, in "Arfive," and a sadness in seeing the wilderness harnessed and gentled. One scene, infinitely touching, seems to condense all that Guthrie has said about the West's final taming. On a solitary trout-fishing expedition, Collingsworth meets and shares a campfire with two aging buffalo hunters who remember the savage country of 50 years earlier. Unlettered, they know only the oral literature of Indian myth and legend, told by Blackfo...

For Guthrie the western novel has outlived its time, and like the gunfighter the western author perhaps will fade into the sunset never to slap ink to paper again. For many readers it's just as well. "The Last Valley," however, is proof that although the Old West is dead, the New West lives on—and, in spite of itself, so does the western novel. In reading this book one recaptures momentarily the westering feeling not just of settling and building Arfive, Montana, a bit before and...

The author of "The Big Sky" and "The Way West" assumed much greater difficulties than either of those admirable books presented to him when he chose to write "These Thousand Hills."… With the earlier works. A. B. Guthrie, Jr. had the advantage of a detailed knowledge of material not generally known and could depend on the curiosity of his readers to enhance his narratives. This latest of his products begins in the 1880s, and his young hero's first acti...