Miles Hood Swarthout

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About Miles Hood Swarthout

Miles Swarthout is the Spur Award-winning author of his first novel in 2004, The Sergeant's Lady. Westerns have been Miles' specialty, as he also wrote the screenplay for The Shootist, John Wayne's final film, based upon Miles' father, Glendon Swarthout's classic novel, which also won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America in 1975. Miles was nominated for a Writers Guild award as Best Adaptation in 1976, when The Shootist movie was released. That film has since come to be regarded as one of the Duke's very best Westerns, with its stellar cast of Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, Richard Boone, Scatman Crothers, and other well-known supporting actors. Miles has recently published a sequel novel, The Last Shootist, in hard cover from Forge Books/Macmillan, which debuted in October, 2014, to terrific early reviews.

Miles lives in Los Angeles near the beach and LAX and has adapted others of his dad's novels, including A Christmas Gift (available on Kindle downloads), which became the 1978 CBS TV-Movie, A Christmas To Remember. Miles continues to write screenplays, and one of them, The Homesman, again based upon one of his late father's original Western novels, is now in release as a feature film, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Meryl Streep, and Hilary Swank. The
film premiered at the famous Cannes Film Festival in May of 2014. This frontier Western is now in selected theatres for Oscar consideration, considering that 3 former best actor winners are in its cast. An ebook and trade paperback edition of The Homesman are now available on Amazon Books.

The rest of the Swarthouts' book titles are also available for downloading on Amazon's Kindle EBook readers. Miles has a Western short story in the Western Writers' anthology, Roundup!, published in June, 2010, and a chapter on the making of The Shootist in a newly revised Wayne fanbook, Duke: We're Glad We Knew You, currently available from Citadel Press/Film.

Check out the Swarthout's entire backlist and the 9 movies made from them on their literary website, www.glendonswarthout.com. That website also contains Miles' short comedy film, Mulligans!, which stars Tippi Hedren and Marcia Rodd, and won 8 prizes in film festivals world-wide, besides airing 50 times on the Womens' Entertainment (WE) cable TV network. Mulligans! streams for free.

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Titles By Miles Hood Swarthout

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The Shootist Oct 1, 2011

by Glendon Swarthout , Miles Swarthout

( 272 )

$16.95

The Shootist is John Bernard Books, a gunfighter at the turn of the twentieth century who must confront the greatest Shootist of all: Death. Most men would end their days in bed or take their own lives, but a gunfighter has a third option, one that Books decides to exercise. He may choose his own executioner.

As word spreads that the famous assassin has incurable cancer, an assortment of human vultures gathers to feast on the corpse—among them a gambler, a rustler, a clergyman, an undertaker, an old love, a reporter, even an admiring teenager. What follows is the last courageous act in Books’s own legend.

This classic, Spur Award–winning novel was chosen by the Western Writers of America as one of the best western novels ever written and was the inspiration for John Wayne’s last great starring role in the acclaimed 1976 film adaptation. The Bison Books edition includes a new introduction by the author’s son, Miles Swarthout, in which he discusses his father’s work and the making of the legendary film.

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Leather Bound , Paperback , Mass Market Paperback , MP3 CD

The Sergeant's Lady Feb 3, 2003

by Miles Hood Swarthout

( 8 )

$4.99

The Sergeant's Lady won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America as the Best First Novel of 2004 and received some terrific reviews. It was chosen one of the best new books about the Southwest by the Friends of the Pima County (Tucson) Libraries in 2003.
The Sergeant's Lady is a frontier love story between an aging Army Sergeant scout and a rancher's middle-aged divorcee sister, backdropped by the very last bloody raid into Arizona Territory by Apache renegades under Chiricahua Chief Naiche's (Cochise's second son) leadership at the tail-end of the twenty-six years-long war with these fierce Apaches in the spring of 1886. General Nelson Miles had just taken over command from disgraced General George Crook, who had lost Geronimo and some of his recalcitrant warriors and families after they'd first surrendered and started back under escort to Fort Bowie in northern Arizona, then changed their minds after an all-night drunk and fled back across the border toward their sanctuary in Mexico's vast Sierra Madre Mountains, soon to return to terrorize America's southern borders again.
To secure his military communications after warriors kept cutting his telegraph wires, Brigadier General Miles organized heliographs, a newly tested network of sun-flashing mirrors utilizing Morse code. In a couple months heliographs were set up on 33 mountaintops across the huge southwestern territory to watch out for these roving Apaches from on high, and to facilitate the movement of Army patrols and supplies between the forts as the massive manhunt, involving one quarter of the entire United State Army at that time, 5000 men, went on for these last few Indian renegades.
This is the story of four soldiers and their leader, Sergeant Ammon Swing, off patrol while healing a leg wound, running one of these heliograph/observation posts. The men strike up a friendship with two homesteaders living on a cattle ranch below their mountain, where this detail goes down to pick up water and supplies. Interestingly, the Lady happens to be the best fighter, better with her rifle than these soldiers, and it is she who ends up saving her boyfriend's bacon in the fierce climax, "the attack on the mountain" by my late father, Glendon Swarthout, upon whose short story this novel is based. Divorced, opinionated, a herbalist and a crack shot, Martha Cox is quite the match for her tough "lifer" Sergeant and all the men, both Indian and white, she comes into contact with in this harsh, violent Arizona Territory in the later 1800's.

Reviews --
"A beautifully written novel filled with historical facts concerning both men in the Army and the Apaches. Each chapter begins with quotes by historical figures, some humorous, some factual, but all interesting. Interwoven with Swarthout's account of the final campaign against the Apaches under Geronimo, is the tender love that develops between Sergeant Ammon Swing and Miss Martha Cox, a woman on the sunny side of forty who is as well suited to Arizona Territory as the century plant. There is not a weak point in The Sergeant's Lady. The dialogue is authentic and occasionally amusing to our modern ears; the characters are complex and three-dimensional; and the sense of place is as strong as an unwashed Private in the U.S. Cavalry. This is a book worthy of acomfortable chair, cold beer, chips and salsa."
Doris Meredith, The Roundup, Western Writers of America's magazine.

"The author's screenwriting experience (The Shootist) stands him in good stead. He paints excellent word pictures, and the story moves at a rapid pace through the short chapters. Character development is many cuts above most genre novels. Minor characters such as Sgt. Swing's men and the Apaches are all distinct individuals. Swarthout imparts much interesting information about Apache and cavalry life without force-feeding the reader.

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover , Mass Market Paperback , MP3 CD

Easterns and Westerns -- the short stories of Glendon Swarthout Aug 20, 2012

by Glendon Swarthout , Miles Hood Swarthout

( 8 )

$4.99

Easterns and Westerns is bestselling novelist Glendon Swarthout's very last book and only short story collection. It includes 13 short stories and one unpublished novella (longer story), some of which have appeared earlier in national magazines like Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post. One of these, "A Glass of Blessings," was an O'Henry Prize Short Story for 1960. Another story, "A Horse for Mrs. Custer," became a 1956 Western film for Columbia Pictures -- retitled 7th Cavalry, starring Randolph Scott and Barbara Hale. A 3rd story, "Mulligans", has been made into a hit short comedy film by the author's son and editor of this volume, Miles Swarthout. "Mulligans" stars Tippi Hedren and Marcia Rodd and has played in 40 film festivals around the world and aired numerous times on the Women's Entertainment (WE) cable channel. But 6 of these short stories are appearing for the very first time in print.

This collection also includes a brief autobiography Glendon wrote, plus his short speech to the Western Writers of America upon receiving their Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991, the year before he died. Glendon's son, Miles, has written an Afterword covering his father's literary career and placing these stories in the context of Glendon's novels, including the short stories which prefigured two of his most famous books -- Where The Boys Are and Bless the Beasts and Children.

Glendon Swarthout had the widest literary range of any American author of his generation, writing 16 novels, which ranged from dramas to comedies to romances and mysteries, plus another 6 novellas for young adults with his wife, Kathryn. Many of his novels became international bestsellers and book club editions, reprinted in paperback editions innumerable times. You will find them in bookstores and libraries all over the world.

Dr. Swarthout's stories have also proven to be quite filmable, as examplified by the two stories in this collection which have already been filmed. Dip into these tales, from dramas to tragedies to laugh-out-loud comedies, about everybody from teenagers in a bloody mess on their high school graduation night, to college kids on summer vacation, to middle-aged baseball players in spring training, to aging golf widows on a midnight bender and decide for yourself just how good a storyteller Glendon was, with an amazing range of literary styles and subjects. You're in for a treat, enjoying a fine sampling of fiction by one of the 20th century's very best storytellers.

Reviews --
"The posthumous Easterns and Westerns includes a novella and 13 stories by Glendon Swarthout, author of 16 novels including The Shootist and Where The Boys Are. His darkly humorous"Death To Everybody Over 30" tracks a student's guilt and indignation when he returns home for the funeral of a friend killed in Viet Nam. The O'Henry prize-winning "A Glass of Blessings" finds a group of spoiled college kids drinking their way through Europe on a cruise ship. Spanning more than 30 years, this collection is an excellent introduction to Swarthout, highlighting his remarkable versatility."
Publishers Weekly

"A collection of the only short fiction Glendon Swarthout ever wrote, Easterns and Westerns illustrates the heroic and gritty themes that characterize Swarthout's longer fiction. My personal favorite is "A Horse For Mrs. Custer," in which the reader sees the dissarray of the Seventh Cavalry after the massacre at the Little Big Horn through the eyes of a young officer new to the regiment. It reveals the division between those who believed Custer to be a hero and those who saw him as a fool and a butcher....Each of Swarthout's stories, both those about the East and those set in the West, are equally stunning in theme and plot.

Other Formats: Hardcover

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