Madison Smartt Bell Biography

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American novelist and short-story writer, born on a farm in Nashville, Tennessee, educated at Princeton and Hollins College. He became a director of 185 Corporation, an artists' cooperative, and a teacher of creative writing. A European existentialism pervades his work, though it focuses largely on quintessentially American locales and often employs popular genres such as the thriller. His style is disaffected and laconic, reflective of a generation which has lost contact with old beliefs and which sustains itself through a kind of desperate mobility. His books include The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Straight Cut (1986), Zero db (1987), Barking Man (1990), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), and the ambitious All Souls' Rising (1996) about the 1802 uprising in Haiti.