Madison Jones

Madison Percy Jones (1925–2012) was a novelist born in Nashville, Tennessee. He published almost a dozen novels, and was considered "one of the major figures of contemporary southern letters".

Biography Madison Jones was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 21, 1925. He was the son of a Presbyterian businessman, and spent his early years living in suburban Nashville. When Jones was 14, his father purchased Sycamore Farm in hill country 25 miles north of the city. At 17, Jones dropped out of Vanderbilt University to become a farmer, moving to Sycamore Farm where he lived for a year and a half. He became associated with the Southern Agrarians, which proved a great influence on his later work.

After graduating from Vanderbilt in 1949 (where he studied under Donald Davidson) and getting a master's degree at the University of Florida (where he was a student of Andrew Nelson Lytle), he taught English at the University of Tennessee before accepting a creative writing position at Auburn University in 1956.

Literary work His first novel, The Innocent (1957), was favorably reviewed by Robert Penn Warren, who praised him for his "basic seriousness of intention, and his deep, natural sense of fiction."

Allen Tate referred to him as a southern Thomas Hardy; other critics have also noted his "traditional social values and stern Puritanism." He is regarded as having an "essentially religious outlook"; his later work is much darker than his earlier work, "primarily because he has seen the South losing the 'redemptive memory' which gives life meaning and substance." He is winner of the T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing.