The Way West

The Way West is a 1949 western novel by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (descendant of a family that traveled west). The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950. The book became the basis for a film starring Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Widmark.

Contents

• Note on the way west by a b guthrie
• Plot introduction
• Release details
• References

The novel is one in the sequence of six by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. dealing with the Oregon Trail and the development of Montana from 1830, the time of the mountain men, to "the cattle empire of the 1880s to the near present.". The publication sequence started with The Big Sky, then proceeded to The Way West, These Thousand Hills, Arfive (1971), The Last Valley (1975), and Fair Land, Fair Land.

The first three books of the six in the chronological sequence (but not in the sequence of publishing)—The Big Sky, The Way West, and Fair Land, Fair Land—are in themselves a complete trilogy, starting in 1830 with Boone Caudill leaving Kentucky to become a mountain man and ending with the death of Caudill and later the death of Dick Summers in the 1870s. For Wallace Stegner The Big Sky is "the best" of the six novels in Guthrie's sequence. As popular and highly regarded as had been The Big Sky, The Way West was the novel in the sequence to be formally honored with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.