"It was a fine country to grow up in. To find riches, a boy had only to go outside," writes A. B. Guthrie, Jr., aobut his childhood in Montana early in the twentieth century. This autobiography was originally published in 1965 when he was sixty-four and still had miles to go. It recounts lively adventures and reflects on a career that brought fame for The Big Sky (1947) and led to the Pulitzer Prize for The Way West (1949).

In an afterword David Petersen, who edited Big Sky, Fair Land: The Environmental Essays of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1988), describes the last twenty-five years of Guthrie's life. The world-famous author died in 1991 at the age of ninety.

"For more than half a century A. B. Guthrie Jr. was the true voice of the real West. Guthrie recorded it best because he knew it best, because he actually lived the calamitous transition from Old West to New. Blue Hen’s Chick is personal and historical narrative at its most honorable and artistic."—David L. Petersen

"The writing skills and the feeling for the West's eye-stretching distances and dry-cleaned air which won Guthrie the Pulitzer Prize for The Way West reappear here. There is candor. . . . There is humor and a zest for life. There is perception of character and the words to bring it into focus. There is wisdom and beauty."—Christian Science Monitor

"To review an autobiography by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., is first to confront a literary legend, then to see it unfold into an important account that illuminates important times incasual places."—New York Times Book Review