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fu 1?Jurtft at(j-ttuj A.B. GuTHRIE ]R. Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr. was born in Bedford, Indiana, in 1901 and moved with his family to Montana at the age of six months. He attended the University of Montana, moved to Lexington, Kentucky, at the age of twenty-five, and was hired as a cub reporter by the Lexington Leader. He eventually rose to the position of executive editor but left the paper in 1947 to pursue fiction writing and to teach creative writing at the University ofKentucky. In 1953 he returned to Montana and lived there until his death in 1991. Guthrie's first novel, Murders atMoondance, was published in 1943. His novels The Big Sky (1947), The ~y West(which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize), and These ThousandHills (1956) were adapted to film. He published five other novels, as well as The Blue Hen's Chick-a memoir in part about his experiences in Kentucky-andA Field Guide to Writing. He also wrote two screenplays, Shane (1953) and The Kentuckian (1955); a children's book; one volume ofpoetry; and a collection ofenvironmental essays. His sole collection ofshort stories, The Big It, appeared in 1960. In his novels Guthrie wrote about the West, which embodied egalitarian frontier society well into the twentieth century; he is held in high esteem among authors and readers of westerns. According to Guthrie biographer Thomas Ford, Guthrie was profoundly affected by his Kentucky experience, particularly with the Kentucky social hierarchy that was so sharply divisive in comparison to the more democratic and informal society found in the West. Guthrie addresses precisely this issue in "The Fourth at Getup," which, though set in Montana, concerns itself with contrasting the informal, democratic society ofGetup with the class-conscious and tradition-bound society ofKentucky, represented here by a group oftravelingwomen from the upper crust of Bluegrass society. • It was the Fourth ofJuly there in Getup, Montana, and we had just had a parade that everyone said was pretty good even if a little long on ranch machinery and saddle stock and short on fancy works. The rodeo would come later. Now people were just milling around, shouting hello and having some horseplay the way they do when they are feeling free and THE FouRTH AT GETUP 81 easy. Everyone in the county was there-ranchers and ranch hands, dude wranglers, bronc stampers, townspeople, men, women and children. They crowded the sidewalks and spilled out into the street and laughed and yelled and dodged the firecrackers that the small fry were popping in spite ofthe marshal. Overhead, pennants and bunting were flapping patriotically to a breeze that kept sifting the dust around. I had put my horse down in the stockyards corral after the parade and was pushing up the street, stopping every once in a while to shake hands with locals I hadn't seen in nine or ten months, my winter quarters then being in Kentucky, when a lady I recognized as a tourist even without the slacks appeared out of the crowd and called my name, putting Mister ahead ofit. While she took in my outfit of cowboy boots, red shirt and broad-brimmed hat, it came to me that she was a passing acquaintance from the Bluegrass State. She had three lady friends in tow, whom she identified as fellow residents. I would have known they weren't Montanans anyway. Here wind and weather put their brand on face and hair, and girls too big for slacks, ifthey wear them at all, manage to wear them without the appearance ofdefiance in front and apology behind. "We were just passing through on the way to Glacier Park," my acquaintance said, "and we ran into the parade and, of all things, spied you riding in it. We're going to stay for the rodeo. We've never seen one." "I've never been west before," another of the ladies said. "Is it-" she made a helpless little sweeping gesture with one hand while she tried for the right words- "is it all like this?" To the east the bare hills, tan as panther hide, climbed from the valley and leveled into benchlands that ran treeless out ofsight. South, a couple ofbald buttes nosed for the sky. To the west, twenty miles beyond a vacant lot grown up with gumweed, the main range of the Rockies reared, blue and purple with distance, stone and persevering pine. One of the cottonwoods that flanked Main Street had decked...

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