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    A Study Guide for Glendon Swarthout's "Bless the Beasts and the Children"
    A Study Guide for Glendon Swarthout's "Bless the Beasts and the Children"
    A Study Guide for Glendon Swarthout's "Bless the Beasts and the Children"
    Ebook46 pages45 minutes

    A Study Guide for Glendon Swarthout's "Bless the Beasts and the Children"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Glendon Swarthout's "Bless the Beasts and the Children," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535819626
    A Study Guide for Glendon Swarthout's "Bless the Beasts and the Children"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Glendon Swarthout's "Bless the Beasts and the Children" - Gale

      09

      Bless the Beasts and Children

      Glendon Swarthout

      1970

      Introduction

      Glendon Swarthout's novel Bless the Beasts and Children became a bestseller when it was published in 1970. The novel was so popular that a film was made the following year, and it, too, proved a big success. Swarthout wrote many novels and screenplays, both before and after the publication of Bless the Beasts and Children, many of which were very successful, but this 1970 book for adolescents, perhaps above all, has remained very popular. It has never been out of print. Swarthout based the idea for the novel on his own son's experience at a summer camp.

      Bless the Beasts and Children is a coming-of-age story in which a small group of adolescent boys discover that they are not the misfits they have thought themselves to be all their lives. Swarthout creates a story of sacrifice and honor among this group of boys, who are called the Bedwetters. Each boy's emotional and psychological needs are explored as the plot unfolds. The story is one of personal strength and of individual and group triumphs that change all their lives.

      Swarthout's novel happened to publicize the inhumane slaughter of buffalo by the Arizona Game and Fish Department, and as a result, these state-sanctioned slaughters ceased. The buffalo herds still need to be thinned, but the process has been made more humane, and the suffering of the animals is minimized.

      Author Biography

      Glendon Fred Swarthout was born on April 8, 1918, in Pinckney, Michigan. His father, Fred, was a banker, and his mother, Lila, was a homemaker. Swarthout attended Lowell High School, graduating in 1935, and then moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan, where he earned a B.A. in English in 1939. After graduation, he married Kathryn Vaughn, whom he had known since he was thirteen years old. After a brief stint writing ad copy for Cadillac and Dow Chemical and then writing a newspaper column, Swarthout saw his writing career interrupted by the start of World War I, when he and his wife began working at a bomber plant. Swarthout began writing his first novel at night while working at the plant during the day. Willow Run was published in 1943, just as the author was shipped overseas in the infantry. Swarthout was able to serve as a writer in the army and saw little combat. After his return to Michigan, he again enrolled at the University of Michigan, completing an M.A. in 1946. Swarthout began teaching English at the university, and his only child, a son, was born that same year. After he received the Hopwood Award in Fiction in 1948, Swarthout began teaching at the University of Maryland. In 1951, he returned to Michigan and began teaching at Michigan State University while studying for his doctorate, which he received in 1955. Swarthout continued to write while a graduate student and teacher and sold a number of short stories, but his first successful novel was They Came to Cordura (1958), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and became both a best-selling novel and a successful film.

      The year 1960 proved especially successful for Swarthout. Where the Boys Are was published and became a successful novel and film, and

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