Biography

Only son of authors Glendon and Kathryn Swarthout. As a screenwriter, Miles has several produced films to his credit and has written and optioned originals, as well as adaptations of his late father's many novels, including The Shootist, John Wayne's final film, for which Miles received a Writers Guild nomination for Best Adaptation in 1976. In 2001, Miles also edited a collection of his father's short stories titled Easterns and Westerns, which is available in hard cover from Michigan State University Press. This story collection contains an extensive Afterword by Miles about his father's literary career, plus a brief autobiography by Glendon.

As an author himself, Miles' novel, The Sergeant's Lady, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers as the Best First Western Novel of 2004. He also has a short story in the Western Writers member story anthology, Roundup!, from 2010.

Miles was the original paid writer on The Homesman (uncredited), directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones, which will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, 2014. A trade paperback reprint of his father, Glendon's prizewinning novel, The Homesman, will be released by Simon & Schuster in February of 2014, with an Afterword by Miles on the creation of this Spur and Wrangler Award-winning Western novel from 1988 by Glendon Swarthout.

Miles' own new Western novel, The Last Shootist, will be published in hard cover by Forge Books (Macmillan) in September of 2014. The Last Shootist is a sequel novel to his late father's famous Spur-winning Western, The Shootist, which became John Wayne's final film in 1976, for which Miles co-wrote the screenplay. A TV miniseries combining both Shootist stories is being proposed.