A. B. Guthrie

"Fight for us or get shot "It wasn't a threat Bally Buck made to West Cawinne but a grim prophecy. Two six-gun experts couldn't graze the same range--not when one was Robideau, a half-breed specialist in treachery, and the other was Cawinne, the most ruthless lawman in the Southwest. But Cawinne was tired of fighting, tired of his bloody reputation. He had a ranch and a girl and he wanted peace. Yet if he turned his back on the trouble in Moon Dance, he'd get a bullet in it. So he tied down his holsters and tramped down the dusty street to meet a vicious outlaw who'd never been beaten on the draw. A whole town held its breath. And a whole town's life hung on the bullet-spattered outcome

The sequel to The Big Sky, The Way West is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the American West by A. B. Guthrie, the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of Shane. This enormously entertaining classic brings to life the adventure of the western passage and the pioneer spirit, charting a frontiersman's return to the untamed West in 1846. Dick Summers, as pilot of a wagon train, guides a group of settlers on the difficult journey from Missouri to Oregon. In sensitive but unsentimental prose, Guthrie illuminates the harsh trials and resounding triumphs of pioneer life. A celebrated novel, The Way West pays homage to the grandeur of the western wilderness, its stark and beautiful scenery, and its extraordinary people." With A. B. Guthrie, the pioneer West has found its novelist at last."--Bernard DeVoto, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. B. Guthrie, Jr., The Big Sky is a classic portrait of America's vast frontier that inspired the Western genre in fiction. The Best Novel of the American West as chosen by members of the Western Literature AssociationThe Big Sky is the first of A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic adventure novels set in the American West. Here he introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers: traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides, and explorers. Caudill is a young Kentuckian driven by a raging hunger for life, longing for the blue sky and brown earth of big, wild places. Caught up in the freedom and savagery of the wilderness, he becomes an untamed mountain man, whom only the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief dares to love. With The Big Sky, Guthrie presents an unforgettable portrait of a spacious land and a unique way of lie. Foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner

Determined to assert his independence, young Lat Evans leaves his parents' ranch to join a cattle drive