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.

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.

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him to the University of Maryland for a few years, where he ghost-wrote speeches for Congressmen and wrote more unpublished fiction.

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.

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.

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.

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 tale such as Bless the Beasts & Children, science fiction was about the only literary genre he did not attempt.

Swarthout, like most of his contemporaries, was affected by the Great Depression and World War II, which in turn influenced his 16 novels, particularly those set in the Midwest.

Although They Came to Cordura (1958) is set in Mexico at the time of the 1916 border dispute with Pancho Villa, its analysis of the nature of courage was influenced by Swarthout's wartime experiences.

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 cruelty and viciousness of which man is capable.

In setting free a doomed herd of buffalo, the group of mentally disturbed teenagers in Beasts demonstrates valor during harrowing conditions.

Swarthout was a great admirer of Somerset Maugham (with whom he studied, along with Ernest Hemingway and Joyce Cary as part of his doctoral thesis in literature) and humorist Charles Portis, who influenced his writing.

In 1962, Glendon and Kathryn established the Swarthout Writing Prizes at Arizona State University, administered by the English Department in Tempe.

He had adapted a number of his father's novels into films, among them A Christmas to Remember for CBS in 1978, which starred Joanne Woodward, Jason Robards, and Eva Marie Saint.

Miles Swarthout also wrote several articles for Persimmon Hill, the quarterly magazine of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, among them "The Westerns of Glendon Swarthout" in the special summer issue from 1996, "Hollywood and the West", as well as in the sequel to this best-selling issue for spring 2000, "America's First Cinema Cowboy: William S. Hart".

Miles edited the only volume of his late father's 14 short stories, Easterns and Westerns, which included an extensive overview of Glendon's literary career.