Michael Foster

Michael Foster (1904–1956) was an American novelist, journalist, screenwriter and cartoonist.

Personal

Foster was born August 29, 1904, in Hardy, Arkansas, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Carl D. Foster.

Career

Foster began his journalism career with the Brooklyn Eagle. He was a reporter and cartoonist for newspapers in Salina, Kansas; Los Angeles, California, and, by 1937, Seattle, Washington.

He also worked on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer until 1952, when he resigned to devote all his time to writing fiction.

The second novel, American Dream, came in 1937. 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.".

About his final book, The Dusty Godmother (1949), reviewer A.C. Spectorsky wrote in the New York Times that Foster had expanded a slick-magazine short story into a light novel which disappoints largely because it has frequent and unfulfilled intimations and overtones of being far more than just that.

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." Hallmark Hall of Fame, "The Big Build Up", story, 1952