Biography
A.B. Guthrie Jr. was an American novelist and screenwriter. Born in Bedford, Indiana, he moved to Montana as an infant and grew up there. He earned a journalism degree from the University of Montana in 1923 and worked as a reporter and editor for the Lexington Leader in Kentucky from 1926 to 1947, later teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky.
Guthrie is known for his novels depicting the settlement of the American West, including The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949), the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950. He wrote the screenplay for the film Shane (1953), which received an Academy Award nomination, and also the screenplay for The Kentuckian (1955). He returned to Montana in the early 1950s to write full-time and produced further novels such as These Thousand Hills (1956).
Guthrie died in Choteau, Montana, in 1991.
