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Winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, A.B. Guthrie’s The Way West charts the journey of a wagon train from Missouri to Oregon. Sweeping in its depiction of the Western landscapes traversed, the novel is also filled with insight into the everyday details of human nature, exploring not only the physical trials involved in such an arduous journey but also the motivations for undertaking it in the first place. Lije Evans, the fair-minded and well-respected man who ends up leading the train, and Dick Summers, the mountain man who is showing the way (a recurring character in several of Guthrie’s Western novels), anchor the story. But Guthrie also lets us walk alongside many other members of the train at various times, shifting the point of view to show the same events through more than one set of eyes. His eloquent but never overly romantic prose puts the reader fully in the setting and the moment, whether it’s a massive buffalo stampede, a treacherous river crossing, a poignant death, a matter-of-fact frontier wedding, or the everyday heroics required simply to keep the people and animals fed and the wagons rolling ever westward.
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Blurbs from the book cover
Card catalog entry from the Library of Congress
Publisher’s information page from Houghton Mifflin
Amazon.com information page
Barnes and Noble information page
Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction
Works by A.B. Guthrie Jr.
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