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Glendon Swarthout Biography & Facts

Glendon Fred Swarthout (April 8, 1918 – September 23, 1992) was an American writer and novelist. Several of his novels were made into films. Where the Boys Are, and The Shootist, which was John Wayne's last work, are probably the best known. Early life Glendon Swarthout was the only child 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, especially 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 graduate from Lowell, Michigan High School. He took accordion lessons and occupied his free time with books, for at 6 feet, 99 pounds, he was not good at sports. The summer of his junior year, he got a job playing his instrument in the resort town of Charlevoix, on Lake Michigan, with Jerry Schroeder and his Michigan State College Orchestra, for $10 per week . Graduating in 1935, he relocated to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan (UM). He became more seriously involved in music, forming and singing lead for a four-piece band that played for hops and for three consecutive summers at the Pantlind Hotel in Grand Rapids, the largest hotel in Michigan outside of Detroit. Glendon majored in English at the UM, pledged Chi Phi, and dated Kathryn Vaughn, whom he had met when he was 13 and she 12, at her family's cottage on Duck Lake, outside of Albion, Michigan. They were married on December 28, 1940, after both had graduated from UM and Swarthout was writing advertising copy for Cadillac and Dow Chemical at the MacManus, John and Adams advertising agency in Detroit. Beginning writer After a year in the advertising business, Swarthout decided the way to become a writer was to see the world as a journalist. He signed as a stringer for 22 small newspapers and travelled with his bride on a small freighter to South America, sending home a weekly column of their adventures. While in Barbados, they heard Pearl Harbor had been bombed and tried immediately to get to the States, but they needed five roundabout months avoiding German U-boats to cruise the East Coast to Manhattan. Wartime Swarthout was ineligible for Officer Candidate School because he was underweight at 117 pounds. The couple both went to work at Willow Run, the new bomber plant outside of Ann Arbor. Working long days as a riveter on B-24s, he wrote his first novel at night in six months. Willow Run, a story about people working in a bomber factory, was published after a rewrite to mediocre reviews. He always saw this book as his training novel. He was fit enough for an infantry 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 on the beach in Italy, he was transferred to division headquarters. The 3rd Division moved out of Anzio and captured Rome, and Swarthout later landed in the second wave at St. Tropez and saw his only combat for six days, getting eyewitness statements for a few posthumous Medals of Honor as the unit moved rapidly north into France. When the 3rd Division was about to invade Germany, Swarthout ruptured a disc 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 received military disability. He eventually had back surgery in Arizona in his 50s on two imploded spinal discs. Postwar Swarthout returned to UM, earned a master's degree, and began teaching college. During 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 fiction. That autumn, he began teaching at Michigan State University and during eight years in East Lansing earned his PhD in Victorian literature in 1955, while his wife got her master's degree and a teaching certificate and commenced teaching children in the second grade. Swarthout also began to sell short stories to national publications such as Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post. He was paid $2500 in 1955 for one of these stories, "A Horse for Mrs. Custer", which became a Randolph Scott low-budget Western for Columbia Pictures in 1956, under 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 during the Pershing Expedition to capture Pancho Villa, and some of its fictional cavalry troopers had been nominated for Medals of Honor. The book was quickly sold to Random House and 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 money enabled Swarthout to become a professional writer at last. He was 39 years old. He completed another novel while teaching Honors English at Michigan State. Where the Boys Are (1960) was set on the Michigan State campus and was the first comic novel about the annual "spring break" invasion of the beaches of southern Florida by America's college students. MGM's quick movie version, Where the Boys Are (1960), became the highest-grossing low-budget movie in the studio's history. Swarthout went on to write many more novels, some of which were made into movies. He worked on the screenplay of only one, Cordura, at Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles for six months, before moving from Michigan to Arizona, where he continued to teach English at Arizona State University for four years before 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 that were never made; these include The Eagle and the Iron 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 Award and a Theatre Guild Award for his one play, Swarthout was twice nominated by his publishers for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for They Came To Cordura by Random House and Bless The Beasts & Children by Doubleday), he received an O. Henry Prize Short Story nomination (in 1960 for "A Glass of Blessings"), a Gold Medal from the National Society of Arts and Letters in 1972, won Spur Awards for Best Western Novel of the Year from the Western Writers of America for The Shootist (1975) and The Homesman, a Wrangler Award for Best Western Novel of 1988 for The Homesman from the Western Heritage Association, and finally the Western Writers' Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum (previously known as National Cowboy Hall of Fame) in Oklahoma City in June 1991. The Shootist was t.... Discover the Glendon Swarthout popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Glendon Swarthout books.