… was born on this date in 1901. His The Big Sky (1946) is one of the classic works of western American literature. Its sequel, The Way West (1949), won the Pulitizer Prize for fiction in 1950.
What “The Big Sky” is: An unflinching account not only of the hardships and dangers of the 1830-1845 mountain man era, but also a glimpse into the meaning of our own existence here — the reasons why we come, the reasons why we stay. True to Guthrie’s bid for honesty, the answers aren’t always pretty.
Guthrie’s Boone Caudill is the quintessential anti-hero, a mean, moody misanthrope who heads West to escape his troubled past as well as to seek adventure and freedom. Ultimately, though, trouble follows Boone — because, after all, the one thing he can’t run away from is himself.
The theme, Guthrie wrote, is “that each man kills the thing he loves.
“If it had any originality at all, it was only that a band of men, the fur-hunters, killed the life they loved and killed it with a thoughtless prodigality perhaps unmatched.”