NONFICTION
Under the Big Sky: A Biography of A.B. Guthrie Jr.
by Jackson J. Benson
$29.95
A childhood spent on the eastern edge of the Rockies in Choteau, Mont., kindled novelist A.B. Guthrie’s lifelong interest in the pioneers who had settled there 70 years before his family arrived by stagecoach in 1901.
Work as a reporter at the Lexington, Ky., Leader taught him to write tight prose. Mentors from Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship program and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference helped him transform notes on color-coded 3-by-5-inch cards crammed in shoeboxes into “The Big Sky,” the first installment in a six-novel saga of the West that begins in the 1830s and ends at the outbreak of World War I.
Critical praise and a Pulitzer for “The Way West” (1949), the second in the series, confirmed Guthrie’s success in moving fiction about the West from what he called “gun and gallop” pulps toward realistic tales of trappers and settlers who destroyed the land they loved.
In this caring yet objective account of the novelist’s life, Jackson J. Benson uncovers the passions and demons in Guthrie’s life away from the desk, lending the biography meaning for general readers, as well as writers.
Guthrie’s first marriage, to his high school sweetheart, curdled over the years and ended in divorce. His writing stalled, and he drank heavily. A second marriage got him up and writing and down to three glasses of wine a day.
He published novels and articles well into his 70s and became a vocal conservationist. He died in 1991 at the age of 90.
Benson values detail, as did Guthrie. Many scenes in the biography have the rich appeal of good fiction. Guthrie’s mother works a wood- burning stove to keep its temperature even. On his first morning in Choteau, Guthrie’s father is stunned by vistas of the Rockies, the Teton River and seemingly endless flatlands.
In the summer, Guthrie and other writers gathered at his lakeside cabin in the mountains to swap yarns, manuscripts and sometimes blistering comments. Many a writer will wish he’d been there.
FICTION
Chasing Icarus: The Seventeen Days in 1910 That Forever Changed American Aviation
by Gavin Mortimer
$26
In 1910, the year of the events in Gavin Mortimer’s “Chasing Icarus,” airplanes were still such novelties that there was no universally accepted term for the people who flew them. Among the choices were “birdmen” and “jockeys,” but “pilots” had yet to be borrowed from the world of the barge and riverboat.
Mortimer’s tantalizing subtitle, “The Seventeen Days in 1910 That Forever Changed American Aviation,” sets up the three events that pilot his book: The dirigible America took off from New Jersey in an attempt to make the first airborne crossing of the Atlantic; a great race called the Gordon Bennett International Balloon Cup started from St. Louis; and aviators vied to outperform one another in flying stunts above Belmont Park in New York.
This confluence of events seems to have brought aviation to a kind of critical mass, with reporters and pundits predicting a glorious future for flying machines in both sports and warfare, though not, apparently, in transportation.
The little-known heroes of these adventures included the English flier Claude Grahame- White, the Frenchman Jacques de Lesseps (whose father was Ferdinand, builder of the Suez Canal) and the American Arch Hoxsey.
Many of the fliers involved died young, in plane crashes, but not Grahame-White. Before his death in 1959, he marveled at how quickly aviation had progressed. Not that long ago, the Soviet Union had sent its first sputnik into orbit, whereas “the first airplane flight in Europe was as recent as 1906.”
