Madison Jones
{{Short description|American novelist}}
{{about|the novelist|the film and television producer|Madison Jones (producer)}}
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{{Use American English|date=April 2025}}{{Use mdy dates|date=April 2025}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Madison Jones
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| birth_date = March 21, 1925
| birth_place = Nashville, Tennessee
| death_date = July 9, 2012
| death_place = Auburn, Alabama
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| occupation = Writer
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| genre = Novels
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| movement = Southern Agrarians
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| awards = T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing
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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".{{cite book|editor=George P. Garrett, James McKinley|title=Southern excursions: views on Southern letters in my time|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cjPGpfzv3eIC&pg=PA179|year=2003|publisher=LSU Press|isbn=978-0-8071-2850-3|pages=179–81}}
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.{{cite book|last1=Canfield Reisman|first1=Rosemary M.|last2=Booker-Canfield|first2=Suzanne|title=Contemporary Southern men fiction writers: an annotated bibliography|year=1998|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-7hnqQQzVCoC&pg=PA237|pages=237–47|publisher=Scarecrow Press |isbn=9780810831957}}
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),{{cite news |date=15 December 1995 |title=Southern Writer Andrew Lytle Dies |work=Lexington Herald-Leader |page=B2}} he taught English at the University of Tennessee before accepting a creative writing position at Auburn University in 1956. He retired from Auburn in 1987, having been a longtime writer in residence.{{cite book|last=Beck|first=Charlotte H.|title=The fugitive legacy: a critical history|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VL2jJ2rsX5sC&pg=PA257|year=2001|publisher=LSU Press|isbn=978-0-8071-2590-8|page=257}}{{cite web|url=http://wireeagle.auburn.edu/news/195|title='Faces and Stories: A Portrait of Southern Writers' opens Saturday in exhibition at AU's Jule Collins Smith Museum|last=Bishop|first=Scott|date=12 September 2007|publisher=Auburn University|accessdate=9 August 2011}}
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." Success came slowly; his 1967 novel An Exile (originally published in The Sewanee Review), for instance, was shopped around twice by Pat Kavanagh before André Deutsch, who had turned it down the first time, picked it up.{{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/3234033/Pat-Kavanagh.html|title=Obituaries: Pat Kavanagh|date=21 October 2008|work=The Daily Telegraph|accessdate=9 August 2011}}
Allen Tate referred to him as a southern Thomas Hardy; other critics have also noted his "traditional social values and stern Puritanism." Though he is seen as a central figure in American literature, he is not well known; the first monograph on him wasn't published until 2005.{{cite book|last=Gretlund|first=Jan Nordby|title=Madison Jones' garden of innocence|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=x-FlAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Madison+Jones%22+novelist|year=2005|publisher=University Press of Southern Denmark|isbn=978-87-7674-001-6|page=8}} 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 received The Sewanee Review Fellowship for 1955/56, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1968, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. The historical novel Nashville 1864, set during the American Civil War, received the inaugural Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction in 1998.{{cite news|url=http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=AD&p_theme=ad&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EB478AE64044E76&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM|title=Madison Jones is named winner of Michael Shaara Award|date=19 July 1998|work=The Advocate|accessdate=9 August 2011}} He is winner of the T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing.
Bibliography
- The Innocent (1957)
- Forest of the Night (1960)
- ''A Buried Land (1963)
- An Exile (1967)
- A Cry of Absence (1971)
- Passage Through Gehenna (1978)
- Season of the Strangler (1982){{cite news|url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Sb8aAAAAIBAJ&pg=6597,2172811&dq=madison-jones+novelist&hl=en|title=Strangler Unconventional|date=14 March 1982|work=The Daily News|page=6B|accessdate=9 August 2011}}
- Last Things (1989)
- To the Winds (1996)
- Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light (1997)
- Herod's Wife (2003)
- The Adventures of Douglas Bragg (2008)
References
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External links
- [http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=723 Madison Jones] entry in the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture
- [https://rose.library.emory.edu/ Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library], Emory University: [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8zhm7 Madison Jones papers, 1950-1989]
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Category:Vanderbilt University alumni
Category:University of Florida alumni
Category:Miami University faculty
Category:University of Tennessee faculty