David Madden

David Madden (born July 25, 1933) is an American writer of many novels, short stories, poems, plays, and works of nonfiction and literary criticism.

Biography 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 from 1959 to 1960.

His first novel, The Beautiful Greed, published in 1961, is based on a trip to Panama and Chile as a merchant seaman. 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 a deserted resort hotel to tell him the story of her brief love affair with Jesse James.

In The Suicide’s Wife (1978), Madden traces the progress of a very ordinary woman to self-hood as she struggles to understand her husband's suicide and her own vacuous life.

His novel Abducted by Circumstance (2010) is set in northern New York and is about what happens to an abductee, Glenda, as imagined by Carol Seaborg, who witnesses the abduction.

Madden's latest novel, London Bridge in Plague and Fire (2012), is a “meditative narrative” with London Bridge serving as the focal-point of twenty-six characters.

Madden's two short-story collections are The Shadow Knows (1970) and The New Orleans of Possibilities (1982); Pulitzer Prize nomination, The Suicide's Wife, 1979 From 1992 to 1994, he was the director of LSU's Creative Writing Program. He retired in 2008 as Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing, emeritus.

Personal Madden's archive is held at the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library in Knoxville. Madden married Roberta Margaret Young in 1956 after they met at the Iowa State Teacher's College radio station. They have one son, Blake, and currently live in Black Mountain, North Carolina.