Guthrie was born in 1901 in
Bedford, Indiana. When he was six months old he relocated with his parents to Montana, where his father became the first principal of the Teton County Free High School in
Choteau. His father was a graduate of
Indiana University, his mother from
Earlham College at
Richmond, Indiana.:3 In 1919, Guthrie studied at the
University of Washington for a semester, then transferred to the
University of Montana, where he was a member of
Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity and graduated with a degree in journalism with honors in 1923. He worked odd jobs for the next few years. Guthrie published his first novel
Murders at Moon Dance in 1943. In 1944, while still at the
Leader, Guthrie won the Nieman Fellowship from
Harvard, and spent the year at the university studying writing. During his year at Harvard Guthrie began his novel
The Big Sky, which was published in 1947. He quit teaching in 1952 to devote his full-time to writing, Guthrie continued to write predominantly western subjects. He worked for a time in Hollywood, writing the screenplays for
Shane (1953, for which he was nominated for an
Academy Award) and
The Kentuckian (1955). His other books included
These Thousand Hills (1956), ''The Blue Hen's Chick
(1965), Arfive
(1970), The Last Valley
(1975), Fair Land, Fair Land (1982), Murder in the Cotswolds
(1989), and A Field Guide to Writing Fiction
(1991). His first collection of short stories, The Big It and Other Stories'', was published in 1960. ==Personal life==