Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Big Sky | 1947 | A.B. Guthrie, Jr. | Buy |
| 2 | The Way West | 1949 | A.B. Guthrie, Jr. | Buy |
| 3 | Fair Land, Fair Land | 1982 | A.B. Guthrie, Jr. | Buy |
The Big Sky trilogy by A.B. Guthrie, Jr. is one of the most respected works of western American fiction. The three books span the frontier era from the 1830s to the 1870s, covering the fur trade, the Oregon Trail migration, and the closing of the open West.
The Big Sky (1947) follows Boone Caudill, a young Kentuckian who heads west to become a mountain man in the Montana wilderness. The novel established Guthrie’s reputation and is considered one of the finest portraits of the fur trade era in American fiction. The Way West (1949) shifts to a wagon train of settlers heading along the Oregon Trail, led by the aging mountain man Dick Summers. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950. Fair Land, Fair Land (1982) returns to Dick Summers decades later as the frontier he knew disappears under settlement and fences.
Guthrie also wrote the screenplay for the 1953 film Shane and published several more novels in his larger Big Sky sequence, but these three books form the essential trilogy. His prose is spare and attentive to landscape, and the books are honest about the costs of westward expansion for both Native peoples and the trappers and settlers who lived through the changes. Readers who appreciate literary western fiction will find these novels among the best the genre has produced.