Madison Smartt Bell

[shaunx]

i like Madison Smartt Bell very much. he is the author of twelve novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the End of the World (1985), Straight Cut (1986), The Year of Silence (1987), Doctor Sleep (1991), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), Ten Indians (1997) and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989. Bell has also published two collections of short stories: Zero db (1987) and Barking Man (1990). In 2002, the novel Doctor Sleep was adapted as a film, Close Your Eyes, starring Goran Visnjic, Paddy Considine, and Shirley Henderson. Forty Words For Fear, an album of songs co-written by Bell and Wyn Cooper and inspired by the novel Anything Goes,was released by Gaff Music in 2003; other performers include Don Dixon, Jim Brock, Mitch Easter and Chris Frank.

 

[shaunx]

About Madison Bell

Madison Bell was born in 1957 and raised on the family farm outside Nashville. His parents had gone to Vanderbilt and had been friends with Allen Tate and some of the other Fugitive poets. Bell's mother taught him how to read when he was four, and he began having an image of himself as an author "when I was not as tall as the table." "By the time I was seven," he says, "I thought the writer was the most powerful person in the universe--that's what I wanted to be." He went to a grade school that encouraged creative writing, and a high school that didn't. Near the end of his senior year, he had a spontaneously collapsed lung and was offered the choice of surgery or staying in bed for a couple of weeks to see if the lung would mend on its own, which it did. "Out of ennui," he says with a laugh, "I wrote my first real short story.