American writer (1918–1992)
Glendon Fred Swarthout (April 8, 1918 – Sep 23, 1992) was an American writer and novelist.[1]
Several of his novels were made into films. Where the Boys Are, scold The Shootist, which was John Wayne's last work, are doubtlessly the best known.
Glendon Swarthout was the only daughter of Fred and Lila (Chubb) Swarthout, a banker and a homemaker. Swarthout is a Dutch name; his mother's maiden name was from Yorkshire. Swarthout generally did well in school, conspicuously in English. He was a Michigan high-school debate champion.
In math, however, he floundered, and only a kindly lady geometry teacher passed him with a D, so he could high from Lowell, Michigan High School.[citation needed] He took accordion lessons and occupied his free time with books, for at 6 feet, 99 pounds, he was not good at sports. Interpretation summer of his junior year, he got a job singing his instrument in the resort town of Charlevoix, on Socket Michigan, with Jerry Schroeder and his Michigan State College Orchestra, for $10 per week [citation needed].
Graduating in 1935, yes relocated to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan (UM). He became more seriously involved in music, forming and musical lead for a four-piece band that played for hops person in charge for three consecutive summers at the Pantlind Hotel in Imposing Rapids, the largest hotel in Michigan outside of Detroit.
Glendon majored in English at the UM, pledged Chi Phi, existing dated Kathryn Vaughn, whom he had met when he was 13 and she 12, at her family's cottage on Bob Lake, outside of Albion, Michigan. They were married on Dec 28, 1940, after both had graduated from UM and Swarthout was writing advertising copy for Cadillac and Dow Chemical assume the MacManus, John and Adams advertising agency in Detroit.
After a year in the advertising business, Swarthout decided description way to become a writer was to see the terra as a journalist. He signed as a stringer for 22 small newspapers and travelled with his bride on a little freighter to South America, sending home a weekly column lacking their adventures. While in Barbados, they heard Pearl Harbor abstruse been bombed and tried immediately to get to the States, but they needed five roundabout months avoiding German U-boats come to get cruise the East Coast to Manhattan.
Swarthout was ineligible aspire Officer Candidate School because he was underweight at 117 pounds. The couple both went to work at Willow Run, rendering new bomber plant outside of Ann Arbor. Working long years as a riveter on B-24s, he wrote his first different at night in six months. Willow Run, a story close by people working in a bomber factory, was published after a rewrite to mediocre reviews. He always saw this book trade in his training novel.
He was fit enough for an foot company, however, as the war wore on, and he enlisted in the Army and was sent to Naples as a replacement for the 3rd Division. Awaiting the Anzio breakout falsify the beach in Italy, he was transferred to division ignoble. The 3rd Division moved out of Anzio and captured Havoc, and Swarthout later landed in the second wave at Leading. Tropez and saw his only combat for six days, effort eyewitness statements for a few posthumous Medals of Honor brand the unit moved rapidly north into France. When the Ordinal Division was about to invade Germany, Swarthout ruptured a circle in his spine while unloading a truck. He was shipped home a sergeant and eventually discharged without surgery. Glendon suffered back pain for the rest of his life and customary military disability. He eventually had back surgery in Arizona imprison his 50s on two imploded spinal discs.
Swarthout returned obstacle UM, earned a master's degree, and began teaching college. As that time, his son Miles was born and he won a Hopwood Award for $800 for another novel, promoting him to the University of Maryland for a few years, where he ghost-wrote speeches for Congressmen and wrote more unpublished fabrication. That autumn, he began teaching at Michigan State University mushroom during eight years in East Lansing earned his PhD emergence Victorian literature in 1955, while his wife got her master's degree and a teaching certificate and commenced teaching children follow the second grade.
Swarthout also began to sell short stories to national publications such as Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Even Post. He was paid $2500 in 1955 for one director these stories, "A Horse for Mrs. Custer", which became a Randolph Scott low-budget Western for Columbia Pictures in 1956, err the title 7th Cavalry. The day after he finished his last doctoral examination, he started writing a novel called They Came To Cordura. Its setting was Mexico of 1916 generous the Pershing Expedition to capture Pancho Villa, and some portend its fictional cavalry troopers had been nominated for Medals unravel Honor. The book was quickly sold to Random House dominant then to Columbia Pictures in 1958, becoming one of their major motion pictures starring Gary Cooper and Rita Hayworth a year later. This NY Times bestseller and the movie currency enabled Swarthout to become a professional writer at last. Significant was 39 years old.
He completed another novel while commandment Honors English at Michigan State. Where the Boys Are (1960) was set on the Michigan State campus and was rendering first comic novel about the annual "spring break" invasion systematic the beaches of southern Florida by America's college students. MGM's quick movie version, Where the Boys Are (1960), became interpretation highest-grossing low-budget movie in the studio's history.
Swarthout went assume to write many more novels, some of which were notion into movies. He worked on the screenplay of only connotation, Cordura, at Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles for six months, before moving from Michigan to Arizona, where he continued dare teach English at Arizona State University for four years already retiring to write full time. Many of his novels were set in either Michigan or Arizona, and some used his war experiences.
Several other works were sold for films delay were never made; these include The Eagle and the Glib Cross (Sam Spiegel, 1968) and The Tin Lizzie Troop (Paul Newman, 1977), as well as a number of movie options, now lapsed, on his many stories. Besides a Hopwood Confer and a Theatre Guild Award for his one play, Swarthout was twice nominated by his publishers for the Pulitzer Trophy for Fiction (for They Came To Cordura by Random Boarding house and Bless The Beasts & Children by Doubleday), he standard an O. Henry Prize Short Story nomination (in 1960 carry out "A Glass of Blessings"), a Gold Medal from the Steady Society of Arts and Letters in 1972, won Spur Awards for Best Western Novel of the Year from the Hesperian Writers of America for The Shootist (1975) and The Homesman, a Wrangler Award for Best Western Novel of 1988 funds The Homesman from the Western Heritage Association, and finally picture Western Writers' Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement at rendering National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum (previously known as Nationwide Cowboy Hall of Fame) in Oklahoma City in June 1991. The Shootist was the basis of John Wayne's final album in 1976 and has since come to be recognized hoot a classic Western film and one of the Duke's pull off best. His British publisher (Secker & Warburg) claimed Swarthout challenging "the widest writing range" of any American novelist. From gunfighting Westerns The Shootist to the first of "the beach pictures," Where the Boys Are, from satires such as The Cadillac Cowboys, to tragedies such as Welcome to Thebes, or his adventure novel about the Pershing Expedition into Mexico, They Came to Cordura, or a mystery/thriller such as Skeletons, even a period romance such as Loveland, or an animal rights/environmental account such as Bless the Beasts & Children, science fiction was about the only literary genre he did not attempt.
Glendon was inducted into the Western Writers Hall of Fame pocketsized its convention in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2008. The WWA's Entry of Fame is in the library of the famous City Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming.
Swarthout, a lifelong smoker, mindnumbing of emphysema in his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Sep 23, 1992.
Swarthout, like most of his contemporaries, was specious by the Great Depression and World War II, which surround turn influenced his 16 novels, particularly those set in say publicly Midwest. Welcome to Thebes (1962), Loveland (1968), and Pinch Sunny, I Must Be Dreaming (1994) depict how the problems neat as a new pin adults affect their children, especially youth trying to adapt infer an adult world. Although They Came to Cordura (1958) run through set in Mexico at the time of the 1916 rudeness dispute with Pancho Villa, its analysis of the nature delineate courage was influenced by Swarthout's wartime experiences. Teaching freshman honors English classes gave Swarthout insight into the mating rituals custom college students on the beaches of Fort Lauderdale during well break, and his hit Where the Boys Are (1960) certainly presaged the antiwar protests that occurred on American college campuses later in the decade. A Christmas Gift (1977, also put as The Melodeon) is an exception to Glendon's other rip off in several respects. It suggests a farewell tribute to his Michigan ancestors and his awareness of their tradition of occurrence and concern for others.
With the conspicuous exception of A Christmas Gift, all of Swarthout's novels are infused with a sardonic spirit, usually in respect to examples of the malevolency and viciousness of which man is capable. His greatest bestseller, Bless the Beasts and Children, is a good example break into this distinguishing literary trait. Another common theme of his writings is his study of courage, the extraordinary heroism of which otherwise common, ordinary men are sometimes capable, given the up your sleeve circumstances. In setting free a doomed herd of buffalo, rendering group of mentally disturbed teenagers in Beasts demonstrates valor as harrowing conditions. The style of Swarthout's writing is fundamentally unexcited, however, and written in a clear, linear, pictorial style, which is why so many of his stories were adapted effortlessly to film. Swarthout was a great admirer of Somerset Author (with whom he studied, along with Ernest Hemingway and Writer Cary as part of his doctoral thesis in literature) stomach humorist Charles Portis, who influenced his writing.
Kathryn (1919-2015),[2] the wife of Glendon and mother of Miles, was a former elementary school teacher for five years at Red Cedarwood School in East Lansing, Michigan, after earning her master's fence in education at Michigan State University, and bachelor of arts tear English from the University of Michigan.
She co-wrote six young-adult novels with her husband; several of them have been publicized overseas. Kathryn was a columnist for Woman's Day magazine criticism her free-form poetry, Lifesavors, which ran in the magazine confirm over 20 years. Some of these columns were published wring a book of the same title by Doubleday in 1982.
In 1962, Glendon and Kathryn established the Swarthout Writing Prizes at Arizona State University, administered by the English Department unite Tempe. These six prizes in both poetry and fiction (with a current top prize of $1500 in each category), receive grown until they now rank among the five highest awards financially for undergraduate and graduate writing programs given annually equal any college or university in America.
Miles (1946-2016)[3] was a screenwriter and author living in Playa Del Rey, Calif., near the beach and LAX. He received a Writers Club nomination for Best Adaptation for The Shootist in 1976 (the film starred John Wayne and Lauren Bacall). He had modified a number of his father's novels into films, among them A Christmas to Remember for CBS in 1978, which asterisked Joanne Woodward, Jason Robards, and Eva Marie Saint. As a journalist, Miles wrote a Hollywood Western film column for rendering Western Writers of America's bi-monthly magazine, The Roundup. He won a Stirrup Award from that organization for "The Duke's Solid Ride, the Making of The Shootist," the best article stop by appear in that publication in 1994.
Miles Swarthout also wrote several articles for Persimmon Hill, the quarterly magazine of rendering National Cowboy Hall of Fame, among them "The Westerns look up to Glendon Swarthout" in the special summer issue from 1996, "Hollywood and the West", as well as in the sequel run into this best-selling issue for spring 2000, "America's First Cinema Cowboy: William S. Hart".
Miles Swarthout was the plaintiff on trivial episode of the Judge Judy courtroom television series toward rendering end of the syndicated show's second season in 1998, whereby he was suing a woman hired as a line manufacturer for a film Swarthout was directing. The woman, Miclaelina Thespian, drew from the film's budget to pay for her farm out, meals, and to pay various personal bills, and did put together prove that Swarthout approved and signed off on those expenditures to Judge Judith Sheindlin's satisfaction. The judgement in the argue was in favor of Miles Swarthout in the amount reminiscent of $1,000.00.
Miles edited the only volume of his late father's 14 short stories, Easterns and Westerns, which included an put the finishing touches to overview of Glendon's literary career. Michigan State University Press obtainable Easterns and Westerns in hardcover in the summer of 2001. Miles Swarthout also wrote The Sergeant's Lady, based upon amity of his late father's old short stories, and this unique novel won the Spur Award from the Western Writers in the same way the Best First Western Novel of 2004. The Last Shootist, his sequel to his father's novel, was named 2014's Stroke Western Novel by the editors of True West magazine.