With his revered classics The Big Sky and The Way West, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., claimed his preeminent post as the father of the western epic. Fair Land, Fair Land, first published in 1982, marks the sequel to his two masterworks and rounds out a chronological gap, the mid-nineteenth century, in Guthrie's Big Sky series. Reappearing here is Dick Summers, of the earlier sagas, now a wizened conservationist who seeks retribution from his former compatriot Boone Caudill and renewed companionship with the self-reliant Teal Eye. Imbued with a rich sense for the impermanence of the idyllic plains, this...

First published in 1956, 'These Thousand Hills' continues the western epic of A.B. Guthrie, Jr.'s critically acclaimed Big Sky series and follows, in the era it precisely reinvents, Guthrie's 'Fair Land, Fair Land.' Conjuring up the ephemeral world of cattle ranchers on the Montana expanses of the 1880s, this intimate saga delights in the frontier's conniving, roaming eccentrics as they chase after love and their unbridled ambitions.

An enormously entertaining classic, THE WAY WEST brings to life the adventure of the western passage and the pioneer spirit. The sequel to THE BIG SKY, this celebrated novel charts a frontiersman's return to the untamed West in 1846. Dick Summers, as pilot of a wagon train, guides a group of settlers on the difficult journey from Missouri to Oregon. In sensitive but unsentimental prose, Guthrie illuminates the harsh trials and resounding triumphs of pioneer life. With THE WAY WEST, he pays homage to the grandeur of the western wilderness, its stark and beautiful scenery, and its extraordinary...

"For more than half a century A. B. Guthrie Jr. was the true voice of the real West. Guthrie recorded it best because he knew it best, because he actually lived the calamitous transition from Old West to New. Blue Hen's Chick is personal and historical narrative at its most honorable and artistic."--David L. Petersen "The writing skills and the feeling for the West's eye-stretching distances and dry-cleaned air which won Guthrie the Pulitzer Prize for The Way West reappear here. There is candor. . . . There is humor and a zest for life. There is perception of character and the words to bring...

At a difficult and sad time in his family life, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., turned for surcease to reading western and whodunit novels. In his autobiography, The Blue Hen's Chick (also a Bison Book), he touches on that moment when he realized he could write as well as or better than the published plot-spinners. "What about a mystery and cow-country myth in combination?" he mused, "So far as I could recall, the two had never been blended. All right. I'd blend them." The result was his first novel, Murders at Moon Dance, appearing in 1943. It was an audacious debut with bold characterizations and a...