Thomas Savage

Biography

Thomas Savage was born in Salt Lake City in 1915 and spent his youngest years at the sheep and cattle ranch of his maternal grandparents, Thomas and Emma Russall Yearian, in Lemhi, Idaho. His mother, Elizabeth Yearian, divorced his father while Savage was an infant. In 1920 she remarried, this time to Charles Brenner, youngest son of the Brenner ranch family in Horse Prairie, Montana. Savage spent his boyhood between these two ranches, on the west and east side of the Continental Divide, and in Dillon, Montana, where he boarded out for school.
A loner during his school years, Savage—known as Tom Brenner until he published his first novel—graduated from Beaverhead County High School in 1932. He headed for Missoula where, at Montana State College (today The University of Montana), he studied writing under Brassil Fitzgerald. Savage left college for a couple of years, working at a riding academy and a dude ranch in the Pacific Northwest. After he returned to school, he became acquainted with Fitzgerald’s daughter, Elizabeth, who had departed for Colby College, in Waterville, Maine. Savage followed her by train, meeting Elizabeth and her mother at the station in Boston.
Both enrolled at Colby College, where they got married in 1939 and graduated the following year. Savage was already at work on what became his first novel, The Pass. During the war years, he worked a variety of jobs: the Savages lived briefly in Chicago and returned to Horse Prairie, Montana, to help with the ranch because of the manpower shortage. Two sons, Robert Brassil and Richard Yearian, were born in 1942 and 1943, respectively; in 1949, they were joined by a sister, Elizabeth St. Mark. Savage taught writing at Suffolk University and then worked at Brandeis University for a few years, as a liaison between administration and the public and as a fundraiser. The Savages lived in Waltham, Massachusetts.
In 1955 the Savages had bought a ramshackle house on a rocky point in Georgetown, Maine, and they moved there, husband and wife remaining for the next thirty years. By then, Savage had published his first three novels, the third novel, A Bargain with God, proving his biggest commercial success. They took cross-country trips to southwestern Montana and the Lemhi River valley of Idaho to visit family. Tom liked showing off his newest sports car. After 1956, the year his mother died, the trips became much less frequent.
Savage published only one novel between 1953 and 1967, but after The Power of the Dog (1967), he published five more novels within a decade. His novelist wife, Betty, published a total of nine novels, eight of them between 1970 and 1980. Savage published his final two novels in 1983 and 1988. Betty died of lung cancer the following year; thereafter, Savage lived in Seattle and San Francisco before settling, in old age, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, near his daughter. He died in the summer of 2003, at age eighty-eight.

Books

This member has not published any books.