Literature / Film & TV
Thomas McGuane
born 1939 · novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter
Wyandotte-born novelist of Ninety-Two in the Shade who grew up downriver from Detroit and attended Cranbrook before becoming a chronicler of the American West.
- Born
Wyandotte, Michigan
age 86- Birth name
- Thomas Francis McGuane III
- Detroit years
- 1939–1950s
- Field
- Literature, Film & TV
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
McGuane was born in 1939 in Wyandotte, the Downriver industrial town south of Detroit, to Irish Catholic parents who had come from Massachusetts, and spent his boyhood in the Downriver area fishing and hunting on the Detroit River. He was sent to boarding school at Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, spent summers working on a Wyoming ranch, and after brief stints at the University of Michigan and Olivet graduated from Michigan State, where he met his lifelong friend Jim Harrison, then went on to Yale Drama School. His first novel, The Sporting Club (1968), is set at an exclusive northern Michigan fishing club; Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973) was a National Book Award finalist. Since 1968 he has lived in Montana, the setting of most of his later fiction, screenplays such as The Missouri Breaks, and essays on fishing and horses.
Highlights
- Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973), a National Book Award finalist
- The Sporting Club (1968), set in northern Michigan
- Screenplays for Rancho Deluxe and The Missouri Breaks
- Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
- Attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · 1950s
Cranbrook School
The boarding school he attended as a teenager.