Michael Foster (writer)

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Michael Foster (1904–1956) was an American cartoonist, journalist and novelist. Born August 29, 1904, in Hardy, Arkansas, he died March 25, 1956, in California.

Foster was a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute and became a reporter and cartoonist for newspapers in Salina, Kansas, and Seattle, Washington. His nickname was "Gully."

In 1926, he was working on the Los Angeles Express, a daily newspaper. A friend, Charles Harris (Brick) Garrigues, wrote that Foster "writes, paints, and has been called the second most promising of the young poets in America by the Lit Dig [(Literary Digest)] — doesn't know one note of music from another and improvises the most beautiful piano music . . . He roomed down at the house for a while until we had a fight over a novel he's writing and then he moved out — went on a three weeks' drunk and only started back to work when I threatened to knock his block off if he didn't." [Garrigues, George, He Usually Lived With a Female: The Life of a California Newspaperman, page 54.]

Foster's first novel, Forgive Adam, was published in 1935 by W. Morrow and Co. It was followed by American Dream (1937), To Remember at Midnight (1938), House Above the River (1946) and The Dusty Godmother (1949). All of them were, according to Contemporary Authors, "cynical in tone, beginning and ending with suicides and depicting frustrated individuals throughout."

Contemporary Authors, which got its material from the Dictionary of Literary Biography and American Novelists, 1910–1945, Gale, 1981, states that Foster worked on the script for the movie Gone With the Wind, (released in 1939) but the Internet Movie Data Base does not report screen credit for that job.

He Usually Lived With a Female states that Foster's American Dream told the story of a disillusioned newspaperman who discovers through old family letters "what America meant to the writers and what America should mean to him. Several scenes are reminiscent of the tawdry political atmosphere rendered in Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play, The Front Page. (Hecht did get credit for screenwriting Gone With the Wind.)

Brick Garrigues wrote in 1957 after Foster's death that when Foster "had done penance to his father by The American Dream, he had done all he had to do. . . . he had written himself out when he made peace with his father, who was dead; after that, he drank himself to death trying to find something that was not in him."

[edit] References

• He Usually Lived With a Female: The Life of a California Newspaperman (2006) by George Garrigues. Quail Creek Press. ISBN 0-9634830-1-3.