David Madden (novelist)
| David Madden | |
|---|---|
| Born | Jerry David Madden July 25, 1933 Knoxville, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse | Roberta Margaret Young |
David Madden (born July 25, 1933) is an American writer of many novels, short stories, poems, plays, and works of nonfiction and literary criticism.
Madden was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, to James Helvy and Emile Merritt Madden. He was named after David Madden, president of the East Tennessee Packing Co., where many of Madden’s family worked. At the age of 16, he was a radio announcer for WKGN in Knoxville. His first success was winning second place in a statewide one-act play competition with “Call Herman in to Supper” when he was 16. He graduated from Knox High School in 1951.
Madden enrolled at the University of Tennessee in 1951. In 1952, he became a seaman in the Merchant Marine. Following his discharge from the army in 1955, he returned to the University of Tennessee and graduated in 1957 with a B.S. in education; he earned an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 1958, and received a John Golden fellowship to attend Yale School of Drama School from 1959 to 1960.
Cassandra Singing, originally written in 1954 as a one-act play, rewritten in various forms over fifteen years and published in 1969 as his second novel, is about the conflicts between Lone, a motorcycle gang leader who lives a life of the imagination and his invalid sister Cassie, who lives a life of the imagination in Harlan in Eastern Kentucky.
His first novel, The Beautiful Greed, published in 1961, is based on a trip to Panama and Chile as a merchant seaman.
Bijou (1974) is set in a movie theater in Knoxville where Madden was an usher in 1946. Novelist Stephen King described it as “one of the books I admire most in the world.” The protagonist is Lucius Hutchfield, a movie lover and aspiring writer, who is also the main character in Pleasure-Dome (1979), in which he fails to get his little brother off the Georgia chain gang, then moves on to Blowing Rock where he bribes an old lady in deserted resort hotel to tell him the story of her brief love affair with Jesse James.
On the Big Wind (1980) is a novel composed of previously published stories about Big Bob Travis who moves from a radio station in Boone to become a network newscaster.
Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War (1996), places one of Madden’s foremost interests into novel form. It is the fictional memoir of Willis Carr who avoids death by switching to the Confederates during the Civil War.
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