William Kittredge, "regarded as one of America's great western writers," died last Friday at age 88, the Oregonian reported.
Among his books were the memoir Hole in the Sky, which won the PEN West Award in 1992 for best nonfiction book of the year, and Who Owns the West?. His essay collections included Owning It All, The Nature of Generosity and Balancing Water: Restoring the Klamath Basin. He also edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology, published a novel The Willow Field and co-wrote, under the pen name Owen Rountree, nine novels in the Cord series of Westerns. He published articles in such publications as the Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire and Outside, and for more than 30 years was a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Montana in Missoula.
He won two Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards for Excellence, the Charles Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Montana Book Festival. He co-produced the movie A River Runs Through It.
Kittredge grew up on a farm in Oregon but spent most of his life in Montana, and wrote at length about farming, nature, the land--and was often critical of traditional farming and ranching practices. In an interview, the Oregonian wrote, Kittredge said, "At one point I wanted to write about the West and the mistakes that were being made and the best example I could use was myself and my family and the mistakes we had made. And because of that I got a reputation of being hard on my family and being hard on ranch people in general. I don't hate cowboys. Most of the grief I've given is to agribusiness ranchers."