David Madden (born July 25, 1933) is an American writer of many novels, short stories, poems, plays, and works of nonfiction and literary criticism.
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.
[1] Cassandra Singing, originally written in 1954 as a one-act play, rewritten in various forms over fifteen years and published in 1969 as his second novel, is about the conflicts between Lone, a motorcycle gang leader who lives a life of the imagination and his invalid sister Cassie, who lives a life of the imagination in Harlan in Eastern Kentucky.
[2] Novelist Stephen King described it as “one of the books I admire most in the world.”[5] 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.
He also authored The Poetic Image in 6 Genres (1969), Harlequin’s Stick, Charlie’s Cane: A Comparative Study of Commedia dell’arte and Silent Slapstick Comedy (1975), A Primer of the Novel (1980), Writers’ Revisions (1981), Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers (1988), Beyond the Battlefield (2000), Touching the Web of Southern Novelists (2006), and The Tangled Web of the Civil War and Reconstruction (forthcoming in 2015).
[4] A collection of essays by various critics and novelists about his life and work is called David Madden: A Writer for All Genres, edited by Randy J. Hendricks and James A. Perkins (2006).
[4] Madden began his teaching career in 1958 as an instructor in English at Appalachian State Teachers College in Boone, North Carolina.