A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1901 - 1991) was an American novelist, historian, and literary historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1950 for his
The Way West. The author's full name was Arthur Bertram Guthrie, Jr., though he was called "Bud" by his intimates.
Guthrie was born in Indiana but moved to Montana as an infant. He attended school in Montana and worked in his father's newspaper. While in college, at the University of Montana School of Journalism, he worked in the United States Forest Service in the summers. He moved to Kentucky and married Harriet Helen Larson in 1931.
Murders at Moon Dance came out in 1943.
The Big Sky appeared in 1947, with a young person's edition in 1950. The Way West, a novel about the journey of American expansion in the old west, appeared in 1949. Guthrie continued to write predominantly western subjects, including the Academy Award winning script to the landmark film Shane in 1953 and the novel
These Thousand Hills in 1956. In 1960, he published his first collection of short stories,
The Big It and Other Stories.
