The Blue Hen's Chick: An Autobiography

One of the American West's best authors, born way back in 1901, A. B. Guthrie became a rancher, a newspaperman, a teacher, a naturalist, an author who would win the Pulitzer Prize for THE WAY WEST, then a screenwriter nominated for an Academy Award. Guthrie says he went into college as a conservative Methodist, became president of his fraternity, thought he had a good grip on permanent reality: "An instructor of forgotten name asked students to list their prejudices. I couldn't think of any and wrote down 'none.' No prejudices, but we didn't want a Jew in the fraternity and were careful about that. There was only one Negro on campus, a fine boy too, as all admitted, but he was a Negro...No prejudices. Just a normal capacity for realism." But his sense of reality changed: "Gone by the time I graduated was the last shred of belief in supernatural religion. In its place was a vehement rejection that, if less vocal now, yields not an inch to argument. Gone was the complacency about our social order. I became a liberal, if that word has any meaning any more..." Guthrie recounts his reading back then, a long list of authors that he says left him cold in 1963 when he was writing this: "A penalty of authorship is the restriction of range as a reader...fewer and fewer books enthrall him. For myself, I'll never again read a line of Sinclair Lewis. Reaching back once, I discovered I couldn't go on with Tess of the D'Urbervilles, under whose cloud I had lived so long. Dreiser, for all of his power, is too awkward to take. Afraid of disappointment, I haven't reread Frank Norris, much as I used to like him. Shaw is too wordy. Swinburne is too easily expert, Mencken too showy, Wolfe is too much woe-is-me. Of the authors who used to engage me, I find Joseph Conrad and his smoky prose perhaps the most rewarding now." Guthrie tells some good stories, the ones about Kentucky especially interested me (he lived next door to Dr. Thomas Clark) but that section may not interest others. More generally interesting are his encounters with Bernard DeVoto, Robert Frost, and other authors and academics. Howard Hawks, who worked on the movie of THE BIG SKY, recommended him for the job of adapting Jack Schaefer's SHANE: "In 1951 I went to Hollywood, there to write a screen-play based on a thin western novel called Shane. I had never considered Hollywood or imagined I would be summoned. I had never written a screenplay. I had never even seen one on paper." "When my agency called, I was incredulous. Yes, the agency assured me, George Stevens of Paramount was to be the producer-director, and he was an uncommon man, one that I'd enjoy working with. I had never heard of him. I said I wanted to read the book." "Although Jack Schaefer, the author, betrayed some ignorance about the West that I knew--he came to know a lot more--his prose had drive, and it introduced into the myth of the West a couple of elements which, if not unique, were fresh and engaging nonetheless. One w