Read from the first chapter of Under the Big Sky: A Biography of A. B. Guthrie Jr. by Jackson J. Benson:

"Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr. was a hell of a writer, but he could be an ornery cuss. Bud, as he was called, could be dogmatic, insistent, opinionated, and contrary. At the same time, however, he was a gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word—gallant, fair-minded, generous, and kind. Some people hated him for his unabashed political and environmentalist opinions, while others loved him for the man he was. He had a firm social conscience and was determined in his writing to reflect what he saw as the historical truth. But he was not a stern man—he could be funny, a prankster, and a person who loved a good time, drinking, socializing, and telling stories. People liked to be around him.

There is no doubt that his novel The Big Sky was his greatest achievement. He has said that his attraction to the subject of the mountain man came out of his attachment to the history of the West and a desire to tell the truth about a character that was too often treated heroically. He wanted to balance the scales, presenting both the character’s unworthy and his worthy traits. He was at his core a realist. In trying to achieve this balance, get at the historical truth, and represent that truth in fiction, Guthrie joins a whole list of writers about the West who have tried to refute Western myth, to tell it as it was. These writers include Wallace Stegner, Ivan Doig, Fredrick Manfred, Vardis Fisher, Willa Cather, William Kittredge, Norman Maclean, James Welch, Mari Sandoz, Frank Waters—the list goes on and includes almost every Western writer we consider “literary” versus what Guthrie called the purveyors of the “gun and gallop” story.

Guthrie joins these other writers in another way: like them, he writes nostalgically of a West lost, lost to exploitation, development, and population growth. What Walter Van Tilburg Clark called the essential characteristic of the West, its open spaces, would seem either gone or in the process of going. Like these other writers, Guthrie was in love with the land he came to know intimately, and much of his fiction is touched by a regret for a lost love.

His childhood is the story of how he came to become so attached to the plains, benches, and mountains of Montana, an attachment that marked him so deeply that it became the generator of his character and the motive for his writing. He was born on January 13, 1901, in Bedford, Indiana—another among the many prominent Western writers born in the East or Midwest. Six months after his birth his family moved to Choteau, Montana, which, although he didn’t always live there after he grew up, became his place, the center of his writing universe."