A. B. Guthrie

Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr. (January 13, 1901 – April 26, 1991) was an American novelist, screenwriter, historian, and literary historian known for writing western stories. His novel The Way West won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and his screenplay for Shane (1953) was nominated for an Academy Award.

Guthrie was born in 1901 in Bedford, Indiana. When he was six months old he relocated with his parents to Montana, where his father became the first principal of the Teton County Free High School in Choteau. His father was a graduate of Indiana University, his mother from Earlham College at Richmond, Indiana.

A constant reader, Guthrie tried to write while in high school, "fiction pretty much, some essays, but I majored in journalism. My father had been a newspaper man for four years in this little town in Kentucky, and I guess he thought it was the way to become a writer".

In 1919 Guthrie entered the University of Washington, then transferred to the University of Montana, where he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity and graduated with honors in 1923. He worked odd jobs for the next few years.

In 1926 Guthrie took out a $300 bank loan and moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he took a job at the Lexington Leader newspaper. For the next 21 years he worked as a reporter, the city editor, and an editorial writer for the Leader. Guthrie published his first novel Murders at Moon Dance in 1943.

In 1944, while still at the Leader, Guthrie won the Nieman Fellowship from Harvard, and spent the year at the university studying writing. While at Harvard he made friends with English professor Theodore Morrison, "who knew so much about writing, probably more than I ever will." Morrison mentored Guthrie and helped him transition from journalism to fiction.

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