The Sergeant's Lady

Miles Hood Swarthout was born in Arnn Arbor, Michigan, the only child of writer/teachers. His mother, Kathryn, taught grade school in East Lansing, while his novelist father, Glendon, taught creative writing at Michigan State University while writing two bestsellers that became big films -- They Came To Cordura (Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth/Columbia) and the first of the beach pictures, MGM's hit Where The Boys Are. The family moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, for Miles' high school, where he captained the tennis team and his parents collaborated on six young adult novels including Whichaway, which has seen three editions and been optioned three times for television. Miles majored in English at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, while his dad authored the biggest-selling novel ever set in Arizona, Bless the Beasts & Children, which Stanley Kramer filmed around Prescott. After stints modeling clothes, appearing in TV commercials and as a DJ on Phoenix rock radio, Miles spent a year as a VISTA Volunteer on the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. He then got a Masters degree in Telecommunications from the University of Southern California and has since taught screenwriting and film history at his alma mater, CMC, and Arizona State University. As a screenwriter, Miles adapted his father's Spur-winning novel, The Shootist, which garnered him a Writer's Guild nomination in 1976 for Best Adaptation and went into cinema history as John Wayne's final film. After a CBS TV-Movie, A Christmas To Remember, and other script sales, both adaptations of his dad's 16 novels and originals, Miles became a filmmaker himself in 1997 with Mulligans!, a 35mm. short comedy which has become a hit, playing 42 film festivals, winning 8 prizes internationally and airing 50 times on the Women's Entertainment cable network. Besides writing numerous articles for magazines and film reviews for The Roundup, the magazine of the Western Writers of America, Miles edited a collection of his late father's short stories, Easterns and Westerns, for Michigan State University Press in 2001. One of his dad's stories Miles expanded into his first Western novel, The Sergeant's Lady, for Forge Books in 2003, which he also thinks would make a dandy movie. Swarthout lives in Playa del Rey near the Los Angeles airport, where he enjoys body surfing, tennis, chasing starlets and riding the occasional horse.