Stirling Bowen

One of Cline's friends at the Detroit News in the late teens was Stirling Bowen (1895-1955), the son of Wilber P. Bowen (1863-1929), Head of the Department of Physical Education at the Normal School in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and his first wife, Helen M. ("Nellie") Stirling (1866-1895), who died about six weeks after the boy was born. Stirling also had four half-sisters from his father's second marriage.

Stirling Bowen married Gene Beasley (1895-1975) in Detroit in 1915.  They had two sons and one daughter. He contributed verse to the Detroit News and to The Liberator and other magazines.  He published a small booklet An Appeal to the Nation's Courage (1922) protesting the imprisonment of John Pancer, the organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World. But his most significant publication was his only book, Wishbone (1930), a collection of three rather bleak novellas, deriving in ways from Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. (The book was retitled Triad when published in England in 1931.)

He worked on the Detroit News in teens and early twenties, then in Chicago, before moving to New York, where he was for several years the drama critic on The Wall Street Journal. Later he was editor of The Cancer Bulletin.

He was divorced from his first wife in 1945, and two months later married Natalie Mihailova, ten years his junior, who survived him on his death in New York on 11 February 1955 at the age of sixty.