The Big Sky over Fair Land: The Influence of 20th Century American Environmental Discourse on A.B. Guthrie’s “Dick Summers” Western Trilogy

A.B. Guthrie Jr. was a key figure in 20th-century Western genre writing and his Western sequence of six novels centers on humanity’s changing interaction with the environment of the American west. Across the three novels of the “Dick Summers trilogy”—The Big Sky (1947), The Way West (1949), and Fair Land, Fair Land (1982)—Guthrie follows the life of mountain man Dick Summers from the 1830s to the 1870s as he travels across the American west, teaching others the correct method of interaction with the environment. In Big Sky, Fair Land, Guthrie scholar David Petersen’s methodology analyzes Guthrie’s novels in isolation of historical context, focusing on prose, character, and dialogue. He argues that the overarching environmentalist theme across Guthrie’s trilogy is “excess via too-rapid growth.” Building upon the work of Petersen, this ecocritical thesis historicizes the evolving environmental philosophies of A.B. Guthrie that communicate themselves in the Dick Summers trilogy, identifying some of the major influences—thinkers, activists, politicians, and media—on his attitudes and beliefs. Chapter 1 argues that the writing and public policy of John Muir and Gifford Pinchot shaped how, in The Big Sky, Guthrie internalizes the idea of individual environmental responsibility. Chapter 2 argues that in The Way West, Guthrie’s use of the pioneer community as a mythic ideal of community engagement with the environment is influenced by the environmental speeches of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; furthermore, it argues that a comparison between Guthrie’s short story “On the Death of an Eagle” and Aldo Leopold’s essays in A Sand County Almanac demonstrates a shift within the environmental community away from an anthropocentric world view and towards one that is biocentric. Chapter 3 argues that the appropriation of environmentalist imagery by corporate America, exemplified by “The Crying Indian” TV advertising commercial campaign, and the anti-environmentalist policies of Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt prompted drastic tonal changes and a pessimistic ending in Fair Land, Fair Land.Bachelor of Art