A.B. Guthrie, Jr. books

Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr. Non-Fiction Reading Order

Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr. Short Story Collections

Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr. Standalone Novels Reading Order

Sheriff Chick Charleston Mysteries Reading Order

The Big Sky Reading Order

A.B. Guthrie, Jr. (1901-1991) was an American novelist and screenwriter who spent most of his life in Montana. He is best known for his Western novels about the American frontier, particularly The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949). The Way West won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950 and remains one of the most acclaimed novels of westward expansion ever written.

The Big Sky series follows characters across decades of frontier life, beginning in the 1830s fur trade and continuing through the settlement of the West. Guthrie also wrote the Sheriff Chick Charleston mysteries, a five-book series of crime novels set in small-town Montana. Beyond fiction, he produced a memoir called The Blue Hen’s Chick and a writing guide, A Field Guide to Writing Fiction.

Guthrie wrote the screenplay for the 1953 film Shane, which earned an Academy Award nomination. His work stands apart from pulp Westerns because of his careful attention to historical detail and his willingness to show the costs of westward expansion on both the land and the people who lived there.