Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Welcome to Thebes by Glendon Swarthout Glendon Swarthout, Novelist, Dies at 74. Glendon Swarthout, author of "Bless the Beasts and Children" and other novels set largely in the West, died on Wednesday at his home here. He was 74 years old. Mr. Swarthout, a Michigan native who left a teaching post at Michigan State University in 1959 to move to Arizona, had suffered from emphysema for two years, his son, Miles Swarthout, said on Thursday. Mr. Swarthout wrote more than 20 novels as well as numerous short stories, plays and film scripts. Movies based on his books include "Where the Boys Are," "The Shootist" and "They Came to Cordura." Mr. Swarthout was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1960, a gold medal from the National Society of Arts and Letters in 1972, and the Owen Wister Award, bestowed in 1991 by the Western Writers of America. His literary output was diverse. He wrote mysteries, westerns, romances and comedies in addition to children's books. His first novel, "Willow Run," was published in 1943 when he was 25. His most popular book, "Bless the Beasts and Children," has sold more than two million copies since its 1970 publication. His novel "The Cadillac Cowboys" was a protest against the Phoenix area's sprawling growth. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Kathryn, his occasional co-author. The Last Shootist: A Classic Tale of the Wild West The sequel to The Shootist delivers timeless coming-of-age Western adventure, plus a new biography of Calamity Jane, the history of Fort Worth, the little-known life of a Nevada sheriff and Loren Estleman’s best of the best of the West. Author Miles Swarthout’s The Last Shootist (Forge Books, $24.99), a much-anticipated sequel to his father Glendon Swarthout’s best-selling novel The Shootist (Doubleday, 1975) is an excellent Western novel that seamlessly picks up the complex characters and transitioning West of El Paso, Texas, that made the elder Swarthout’s original so popular. Miles’ prose is lean with richly developed characters, tight dialogue and well-researched historic border towns and mining camps of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The hero of the first novel, J.B. Books, is dead, but his spirit has filled the mind and body of The Last Shootist ’s young hero, Gillom Rogers, who has inherited the great gunfighter’s matched pair of .44-40 Remingtons—and the brashness of a teen with deadly dreams: “If I can just learn to handle these pistols as well as Mr. Books did, quick draws, spinning tricks, a sharpshooter, I can become as famous a shootist as that old man was!” Gillom Rogers is an audacious young man with courage known only to those naïve and inexperienced in real life, whose mind is filled with the romantic notions of life as a famous gunman, far from the tedium of middle-class El Paso. He is the son of a pious, Christian widow, Bond Rogers, who dreams of her son finishing high school and going to college. Instead, young Rogers, long without a father, is enamored with the real life-and- death masculinity of Mr. Books. The dying gunman lived his last days boarding in their home, and young Rogers, with the deadly pistols in his possession after Books’ death, can only visualize his life ahead as a shootist on the gunfighter’s trail. “He was quick, very quick. His reflexes, hand-to-eye coordination, distant vision, Gillom Rogers had it all, the lightning-fast instincts of a gifted athlete, or a gunfighter.” Like the young character who picks up J.B. Book’s oversized Remington revolvers to follow the shootist’s gunfighter trail, Swarthout’s confidence in picking up the pen to follow his father’s famous characters into further Western adventures is just as courageous. Miles, an experienced screenwriter, received a Western Writers of America Spur Award for best first novel for The Sergeant’s Lady (Forge Books, 2004). He provides an excellent afterword in which he shares the careful journey he took to write the sequel. Miles also discusses in detail the differences between the novel and his adaptation of The Shootist into John Wayne’s critically acclaimed film and how it affected his sequel. As the author succinctly recalls, Wayne would not end the film the same way the book ends, which is why The Last Shootist opens with the final scene from The Shootist as a prologue. Miles concludes the afterword with an excellent detailed account of historical source material and background on the real locations and historic characters that inhabit Swarthout’s Southwest. And he does it all with equal confidence and success, giving readers a wonderful ride once again into the Western lands that all Swarthout writers know so well—and love to share with all of us. Related Posts. Screenwriter and author Lee Martin’s latest novel, The Grant Conspiracy: Wake of the Civil War…