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Stan Paregien, Editor
Scott Glenn
Scott Glenn, actor, was born on Jan. 26, 1942 in Pittsburg, PA.
He attended William & Mary College, majoring in English. He spent three years in the U.S. Marines, then moved to New York City where he studied acting and the martial arts.
By 1968 he was getting TV roles and theatrical roles. He moved to Hollywood in 1970 and began making films.
However, by 1978 the glamor of Tinsel Town had worn thin. He moved to Ketchum, Idaho, of all places. And there he earned his living doing whatever he could. And that "whatever" included working as a mountain ranger and a bartender.
In 1980 he had his big break when he won the role of John Travolta's rival in the smash-hit movie, "Urban Cowboy."
His work in Western roles has included She Came to the Valley (1977), Urban Cowboy (1980), Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981), Silverado (1985), My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys (1991), Tall Tale (1995), Buffalo Soldiers (2001).
CLICK HERE to see the complete filmography of Scott Glenn.
Frederick D. Glidden
(Deceased)
Frederick D. Glidden, far better known by his pen name of "Luke Short", was born in 1908 in Kewanne, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1930. And four years later he married Florence Elder. He worked at various jobs in the early years--logger, an archaeologist's gopher, and a trapper. He was a tall, robust outdoorsman who detested guns.
He made his first major sale when his Western-adventure story, "Feud at Single Shot," was bought by a national magazine in 1937 and published in serial form. He regularly sold articles and short stories to such magazines as Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Argosy, Western Story Magazine, and others. Oddly enough, it was a publisher who suggested the need for a less "phoney" sounding name than Frederick D. Glidden. And it was his agent who came up with the cryptic pseudonym of "Luke Short". It stuck. And only years later did Glidden discover that the name once belong to a Texas badman.
Regardless, Frederick Glidden became one of the best-selling Western authors of his generation. His fifty or so books included Fiddlefoot, The Feud at Single Shot (1936), Ride the Man Down, Dead Freight for Piute, Hardcase, Man on the Blue, Doom Cliff, The Branded Man, Silver Rock, Trumpets West, Ambush (1950), Trouble Country and his own favorite, And the Wind Blows Free (1945).
The following "Luke Short" books were turned into feature length movies: Blood on the Moon (RKO, 1948; starred Robert Mitchum, Barbara Bel Geddes and Robert Preston), Ramrod (United Artists, 1947; starred Joel McCrea, Preston Foster and Lloyd Bridges), Ride the Man Down (Republic, 1952; starred Brian Donlevy, Rod Cameron and Forrest Tucker), Coroner Creek (Producers-Actors Corp., 1948; starred Randolph Scott, Marguerite Chapman and George Macready), Vengeance Valley (MGM, 1951; starred Burt Lancaster, Robert Walker and Joanne Dru) and Stations West.
He was one of the original 24 charter members of WWA. And after achieving considerable success, he settled down to a schedule of working from 9:30 a.m. to noon, dictating to a secretary in a downtown office.
Active in community affairs, he was on the local hospital board, was a member of the city council, a member of the county zoning and planning commission and other affairs. Glidden died in Aspen, Colorado in 1975, following a nine-month struggle with cancer. He was survived by his wife and by his son, Dan Glidden of Basalt, Colo., and by a daughter, Kate Hirson of New York. Another son, James, died in 1960. Glidden's older brother, Jonathan, was also a Western novelist. Jonathan Glidden wrote under the name of "Peter Dawson".
Fellow WWA member T.V. Olsen said of Glidden, "There are few, if any writers working in today's field of the popular Western who haven't been influenced directly or indirectly by the writing of the late Frederick D. Glidden, known to his millions of admirers as Luke Short. My own debt is particularly large to this man I never met or otherwise had contact with, for he influenced my career more than any other person. I am sure of one thing: the best of his novels will be read and enjoyed so long as people of the world over read and enjoy the Western story" (The Roundup, Oct., 1975; see Glidden's photo and obituary in the same issue.)
And WWA-er Brian Garfield, studied writing under Glidden from the age of 15, said of his mentor: "He was the consummate Western storyteller; his novels were the models for a generation of writers. He set a mark for the rest of us to aim for.
"Fred Glidden did not follow trends; he created them. For all his insisting that he was only a yarnspinner, not a lit'ry fellow, he was nevertheless the ultimate professional. That very lack of pretentiousness set him apart--his honesty showed through in every written line. But he did nothing by luck or accident; he studied his craft as a master musician studies his instrument. He was analytical, perceptive, heuristic" (The Roundup, Nov., 1975).
No wonder, then, that in 1969 the Western Writers of America bestowed its highest honor, the Saddleman Award, to Frederick D. Glidden. (See T.V. Olsen's analysis of Glidden's writing in the March, 1973 issue of The Roundup.)
Jonathan Glidden
(Deceased)
An older brother to Frederick Glidden, Jonathan Glidden was born at Kewanee, Ill. He graduated from the University of Illinois. He moved to New Mexico in 1937. He served in World War II and later was with the Central Intelligence Agency in Western Europe.
Jonathan Glidden was an active member of WWA, serving as chairman of the 1956 convention in Santa Fe. He wrote numerous Western novels under the pseudonym of "Peter Dawson".
Jonathan Glidden, 50, died at the Wagon Wheel Ranch near Creed, Colorado on July 22, 1957, while on a fishing trip. He was survived by his wife and two sons, David and Timothy, and by his brother, Frederick. (See his photo and obituary in the Aug., 1957 issue of The Roundup.)
Molly Gloss
Molly Gloss says she was greatly influenced by the western novels she read as a child. She often went to the public library with her father and would "sneak" books from the "adult" area into the stack of books her father had already selected. She writes, "What my dad read was Westerns, just about exclusively. That was all right with me--I was at an age for pretending I was a man--but by then I'd discovered there were Westerns that weren't on the `Westerns' shelf, things like The Virginian, The Ox-Box Incident, The Wonderful Country, These Thousand Hills, Honey in the Horn, Shane. I found Willa Cather's pioneer works, too, and then the novels of women who wrote almost contemporary with the times--Mary Austin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Gertrude Atherton.
"Eventually I also read the non-fiction of western women, books like Elinor Stuart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader, and Isabella Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. And graduatlly, in reading these and other `women's westerns', I began to feel a pull toward writing a western of my own. I thought it might be possible to write a more-or-less genre Western with a woman as the hero. But my reading of women's diaries and letters had given me a `real' woman character, and I found when I set her down among standard genre elements--a grizzly, a roundup, an Indian, bad guys, gunfire--the events and the people were given an unanticipated complexity, simply by her presence among them. And the book that resulted will perhaps not fit comfortably on the `Westerns' shelf after all." That book is The Jump-Off Creek (Houghton Mifflin, 1989).
Molly Gloss has also written novels and short stories for Calyx: A journal of Art and Literature by Women, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Universe 14, Young American, Issac Asimov's Magazine of Science Fiction, and Northwest Magazine.
Danny Glover
Danny Glover, actor, was born on July 22, 1947 in San Francisco. He studied acting at the Black Actor's Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater. He performed in productions at the Los Angeles Actors Theater, the Eureka Theater, and later on Broadway.
He is best known for his work with Mel Gibson in the "Lethan Weapon" series of adventure films.
However, the 6'4" actor has also appeared in such Western films as "Silverado" (1985) and Maverick (1994). He also played the part of Joshua Deets in the 1989 TV Western mini-series, "Lonesome Dove". And he starred in the TV Western, "Buffalo Soldiers" (1998).
CLICK HERE to see the complete filmography of Danny Glover.
This listing is far from complete and may contain errors.
Therefore, all Western entertainers and/or their agents
are requested to submit recommended changes by
contacting Stan Paregien.
Do not be like the horse or the mule,
which have no understanding
but must be controlled by bit and bridle
or they will not come to you.
Many are the woes of the wicked,
but the Lord's unfailing love
surrounds the man who trusts in him.
--- Bible: Psalm 32:9-10
© 2003 by Stan Paregien, Sr.