Books: On to Oregon

THE WAY WEST (340 pp.)—A. B. Guthrie Jr.—Sloane ($3.50).

Two years ago, at 46, Montana-born Novelist Guthrie, a veteran Kentucky newspaperman (Lexington Leader), proved in his first novel, The Big Sky, that an honest imagination edged with poetic understanding could rescue the trading and trapping mountain men of the West from the fake-heroic fictional mold into which they had long been cast. Now in The Way West, Guthrie has irrevocably separated the covered-wagon pioneers of the 1840s from the busy, lusty book jackets and movie posters which have long held them in box-office...

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