Montana Center for the Book
An Affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress
A Program of Humanities Montana

Montana's Literary Treasures

[originally for Montana's Cultural Treasures]

 by Mark A. Sherouse

Perhaps it’s the long winters, the hours by streamside, the contemplation of open vistas or mountain grandeur, or just the beauty or the harshness of the place, but Montanans are reflective people. From the legends and stories of the first Montanans to the most recent poem, novel, or screenplay, Montanans have given expression to their reflection in a growing body of literature as wide-ranging, important, and distinctive as the place itself. For residents as well as visitors, Montana offers great literary treasure to mine and insights and joys to share.

The lore of Montana Native Americans continues to be passed down, collected, and studied for its beauty, lucidity, and wisdom. Works such as Walter McClintock’s The Old North Trail and Frank Bird Linderman’s Plenty-Coups: Chief of the Crows and Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows, were among the first of careful and caring transcriptions. The more recent novels of Native American authors like D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded and Wind from an Enemy Sky, and James Welch, Winter in the Blood and Fools Crow, bring these traditions into more contemporary genres, addressing contemporary issues.

The Journals of Lewis and Clark, whose Voyage of Discovery spent much of its time in Montana, open a period of diaries and memoirs of the frontier. Among the best known are cowboy Teddy Blue Abbot’s We Drove Them North and Granville Stuart’s Forty Years on the Frontier, and, coming to light more recently, Andrew Garcia’s Tough Trip through Paradise and Nannie Alderson’s A Bride Goes West. Charlie Russell, better known as a painter and cowhand, also wrote. His 1927 sketches and memoirs, Trails Plowed Under, continues to attract notice and admiration.

Throughout its early years as a state, Montana’s great city was Butte, where the industrial revolution met the frontier. Butte had its share of writers, Dashiell Hammett, passingly, and, more characteristically, Myron Brinig, author of Wide Open Town, and the notorious Mary MacLane, whose 1902 The Story of Mary MacLane shocked the nation.

By the 1940s, such writers as Mildred Walker, among whose many novels the 1944 Winter Wheat is best known, crusader Joseph Kinsey Howard–whose High, Wide, and Handsome is still Montana’s favorite history–and A. B. Guthrie, Jr., came into prominence. Guthries’s classic, The Big Sky, appeared in 1947, and still is regarded by many as the definitive historical novel of the West. His 1950 novel The Way West won a Pulitzer prize.

The latter half of the century has seen a burgeoning of important writing from Montanans and others with strong Montana associations. The likes of Wallace Stegner, poet Richard Hugo, Norman Maclean, Dorothy Johnson, Ivan Doig, William Kittredge, among many others, have achieved national prominence. The literate visitor also will recognize Montana authors such as Richard Ford (whose Independence Day won a Pulitzer in 1996), Patricia Goedicke, Ralph Beer, James Crumley, Mary Clearman Blew, David James Duncan, Diane Smith, Paul Zarzyski, Jim Harrison, James Lee Burke, Deirdre McNamer, Thomas McGuane, Rick de Marinis, and Wallace McRae—to name only a few.

Montana reflection appears not only in poetry and fiction. There are important histories by Joseph Kinsey Howard, K. Ross Toole, Michael Malone, Richard Roeder, William Lang, David Walter, and others. The writings in political philosophy of former Missoula Mayor Dan Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place and The Good City and the Good Life, have attracted national attention, including a 1997 Frankel Prize from the White House. There also are acclaimed science and environmental writers, such as Bozeman’s David Quammen, author of the recent The Song of the Dodo, and the Yaak’s prolific Rick Bass, known for his fiction as well as environmental writing.

Nor has Montana literature and reflection stayed within book bindings. Writer Annick Smith’s 1979 film, Heartland, won critical acclaim. Tom McGuane’s Rancho Deluxe also has achieved notoriety. Nearly everyone has seen and been moved by the cinema version of Maclean’s novella  A River Runs Through It. Legends of the Fall and The Horse Whisperer are more recent additions to an already extensive Montana film genre.

And then there are books about Montana literature and reflection: most recently William Bevis’ Ten Tough Trips: Montana Writers and the West, and Rick Newby and Suzanne Hunger’s collection Writing Montana: Literature under the Big Sky.

Perhaps the best evidence of Montana reflection and creative expression is the state’s 1989 centennial literary anthology, The Last Best Place, edited by William Kittredge and Annick Smith. A landmark in regional publishing, this 1,100-page behemoth is now in its fourth printing and anchors many nightstands throughout the Big Sky Country. In size and sweep, it is an appropriate sampling of the Treasure State’s literary treasures.