Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2010
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 30:3 (Spring 2010).
Abstract
On the Web site of a major bookseller, a "customer reviewer" claims that A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s 1947 novel The Big Sky "is really about freedom." Jackson Benson acknowledges the romanticism of Guthrie's writing, but he argues more convincingly that the novel is actually about how "man always destroys the thing he loves." Benson applies this idea to all of Guthrie's work, describing the writer as a Western environmentalist, saddened and angered by his region's history of damage and depredation.
Benson places Guthrie (1901-1991) in the pantheon of writers who have "tried to refute Western myth, to tell it as it was" (naming, among others, Manfred, Cather, and Sandoz). The subjects of Benson's previous three biographies also qualify: John Steinbeck, Wallace Stegner, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark. With the latter two especially, as with Guthrie, Benson concentrated on their writing about changes in the land.
Comments
Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.