CANR
WORK TITLE: CHILD OF LIGHT
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CITY: Baltimore
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 338
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PERSONAL
Born August 1, 1957, in Nashville, TN; son of Henry Denmark and Allen Bell; married Elizabeth Spires (a poet), June 15, 1985; children: Celia Dovell.
EDUCATION:Princeton University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1979; Hollins College, M.A., 1981.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Security guard at Unique Clothing Warehouse (boutique), 1979; production assistant for Gomes-Lowe Associates (commercial production house), 1979; sound man for Radiotelevisione Italiana (Italian national network), 1979; Franklin Library (publishing firm), New York, NY, picture research assistant, 1980, writer of reader’s guides, 1980-83; Berkley Publishing Corp., New York, manuscript reader and copywriter, 1981-83; Goucher College, Towson, MD, assistant professor of English, 1984-86, writer-in-residence, beginning 1988, then professor of English, director of the college’s Kratz Center for Creative Writing, 1999-2008, codirector of the Kratz Center, 2013—. Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography Institute, 2011-12. Visiting writer, Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, New York, 1984-86, Iowa Writers Workshop, 1987-88, and Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, 1989-93. Also director of 185 Corporation (media arts organization), 1979-84.
MEMBER:PEN American Center, Authors Guild, Authors League of America, Poets and Writers, Phi Beta Kappa, Fellowship of Southern Writers, Society of American Historians (fellow).
AWARDS:Ward Mathis Prize, 1977, for short story “Triptych,” Class of 1870 Junior Prize, 1978, Francis LeMoyne Page Award, 1978, for fiction writing, and Class of 1859 Prize, 1979, all from Princeton University; Lillian Smith Award, 1989; Guggenheim fellowship, 1991; Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, 1991-92; George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Award, 1991-92; National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, 1992; Goucher Chair of Distinguished Achievement, Goucher College, 1995—; National Book Award finalist, 1995, PEN/ Faulkner Award finalist, 1996, Maryland Author Award, Maryland Library Association, 1996, and Anisfield-Wolf Award, 1996, all for All Souls’ Rising; selected as one of the “Best American Novelists under Forty,” Granta, 1996; John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, 2001; Andrew James Purdy Fiction Award, Hollins College; Strauss Living Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2008.
WRITINGS
Author of readers’ guides, Franklin Library, 1979-83. Author of the preface to books, including A Wake for the Living, by Andrew Lytle, J.S. Sanders, 1992; and The King of Babylon Shall Not Come against You, by George Garrett, Harvest/Harcourt Brace, 1997. Contributor to books, including Critical Essays on Peter Taylor, G.K. Hall, 1993; and Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past, edited by Mark Carnes, Simon & Schuster, 2001. Contributor of short fiction to numerous anthologies. Contributor of short fiction, essays, articles, and book reviews to periodicals, including Atlantic, Harper’s, Antaeus, Boulevard, Cosmopolitan, Literary Review (London, England), Ploughshares, Columbia, Crescent Review, Northwest Review, Lowlands Review, Poughkeepsie Review, Stories, Tennessee Illustrated, New York Review of Books, Switch, Southern Review, Witness, Hudson Review, North American Review, Chronicles, World and I, New York Times Magazine, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, London Standard, Boston Globe, Southern, New York Times Book Review, Village Voice, and Los Angeles Times Book Review.
SIDELIGHTS
“Madison Smartt Bell has been called a postmodernist, a minimalist, a prose poet of aloneness, and the best writer of his generation,” wrote Donna Seaman in Booklist. “His distinctively riling fiction sizzles with tension and menace.” Bell, who had published six novels and two short-story collections by the time he was thirty-five years old, usually writes about society’s misfits. Most of his main characters are petty criminals, drifters, and lost souls whose lives Seaman describes as “fateful and apocalyptic.”
Save Me, Joe Louis exemplifies the themes and situations found in much of Bell’s fiction. In this novel, Macrae, an AWOL southerner, and Charlie, an unstable ex-con, forge a dangerous partnership soon after meeting in New York City. Together they embark on a small-time crime spree that eventually leads them to flee for Macrae’s backcountry homeland. There, the relationship sours and violence erupts.
Macrae and Charlie are typical of Bell’s protagonists in that there is little to like about them; many commentators have found that one of the great strengths of Bell’s writing is his ability to generate characters for such people. Andy Solomon wrote in the Chicago Tribune Books that Bell “moves among modern thieves and lepers with charity. His is a Robert Browning empathy that creates no character so defiled that Bell cannot ask, ‘What is at the heart of this man that is in me as well?’ In Macrae, Bell once again takes a character you’d be disturbed to find living anywhere near your neighborhood, then moves relentlessly against the grain of popular thought to find the embers of Macrae’s humanity beneath the ashes of his pain.” Reviewing the novel for Booklist, Seaman called Save Me, Joe Louis “a work of ferocious intensity and poetic nihilism” in which Bell examines the “soul’s disturbing capacity for both good and evil and the pointlessness of unexamined lives lived wholly by instinct and rage.”
Rage is at the center of All Souls’ Rising, an epic history of Haiti’s war for independence, which broke out shortly after the French Revolution in the late 1700s. The strange alliances, hatred, and tensions among Haiti’s rich white ruling class, the poor whites, the free mulattoes, and the island’s mistreated slave population culminated in a fifteen-year bloodbath. In just the first few months of the revolution, 12,000 people perished and nearly 200 plantations were burned. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, John Vernon described Bell’s historical novel as a “carefully drawn roadmap through hell.” “ All Souls’ Rising, ” he continued, “is historical fiction in the monumental manner, heavily prefaced, prologued, glossaried and chronologized. It admirably diagrams the complex muddle of eighteenth-century Haiti, a slave society constructed along clearly racist lines but with surprising alliances. Haitian whites, split into royalists and revolutionaries, alternately compete for and spurn the loyalties of free mulattoes, for whom gradations of color are of central importance.” Vernon added: “This bizarre and rich stew is the perfect stuff of fiction, whose subject is never reality but competing realities.”
Countless atrocities were committed on all sides in the Haitian revolution, and Bell’s book details many examples. For some reviewers, the gore was too much. Brian Morton expressed little enthusiasm for the novel, stating in the New Statesman that All Souls’ Rising “is an ugly book about ugly times.” Vernon also found the scenes of mutilation, rape, and violence relentless and warned that such repeated gore may numb the novel “into a handbook of splatter-punk. To his credit,” Vernon continued, “Bell knows that violence may be the writer’s hedge against mawkishness, but it also threatens to become mere slush, the sentimentality of gore.” Still, Vernon found much to praise, especially Bell’s ability to humanize all types of characters, and noted that while there are flaws in the novel, they are overshadowed by its power and intelligence: “ All Souls’ Rising, refreshingly ambitious and maximalist in its approach, takes enormous chances, and consequently will haunt readers long after plenty of flawless books have found their little slots on their narrow shelves.”
A Publishers Weekly contributor expressed unreserved enthusiasm for All Souls’ Rising, deeming it an “astonishing novel of epic scope.” The reviewer argued that “Bell avoids the sense of victory that mars so many novels about revolution.” After the many scenes of massacre, rape, and violence, the critic continued, “there can be no question of a winner of the battle for Haitian liberation. Surviving it was feat enough. In Bell’s hands, the chaos … that surrounds these characters somehow elucidates the nobility of even the most craven among them.”
Discussing All Souls’ Rising with Ken Ringle, writing for the Washington Post Book World, Bell compared Haiti’s race conflict with conditions in the contemporary United States. “Haiti’s was a full-blown race war,” he explained, “over issues we’ve never really come to terms with in this country. Now we’re having our own race war. But it’s a slow-motion race war, disguised as crime in the streets. And nobody, black or white, wants to admit what’s happening.”
Bell’s next novel, Ten Indians, centers on a white, middle-aged therapist for children named Mike Devlin who creates in the black ghetto of Baltimore a school for Tae Kwon Do, which ends up drawing people from two rivaling drug gangs. One member becomes involved with Devlin’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Michelle. A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that in the novel, which switches between first- and third-person narratives, “Devlin’s motivations … remain personally unclear, if admirable in the abstract,” but the reviewer called Bell “a natural storyteller.” John Skow, in a review for Time, noted that “the working out, told partly from Devlin’s viewpoint and partly, in convincing street language, from that of the drug dealers and their women, is spare and cinematic.” Skow summed up: “Good ending, good novel.” In a review of Ten Indians, Booklist reviewer Michael Cart mentioned that the novel “would be a wonderful book for mature young adult readers” because it “captures the mix of literary quality and right-on relevance that, if put into the right readers’ hands, can change lives—one individual at a time. It can, in fact, translate good intentions into redeeming reality.”
Anything Goes, which centers on a bass player in a bar band, reflects a world with which Bell has some personal experience. With poet Wyn Cooper, who came to fame as the author of the lyrics of the Sheryl Crow song All I Wanna Do, Bell collaborated on a CD, Anything Goes, which contains the songs mentioned in Bell’s book. The CD garnered the duo a recording contract and a second album, titled Forty Words for Fear.
Bell’s novel The Stone That the Builder Refused is the third in his trilogy about the Haitian Revolution, which began with All Souls’ Rising and was followed by Master of the Crossroads. Seaman, writing in Booklist, called The Stone That the Builder Refused “prodigious, breathtaking.” Seaman went on to write that the author’s “commitment to telling the whole true story of the world’s only successful slave revolution is an act of sustained scholarship.”
In addition to his novels about the Haitian Revolution, Bell has also written his first biography. Toussaint Louverture: A Biography delves into the life of the man who led the Haitian slave revolt that led to a nation independent of France. In a review in the Library Journal, Boyd Childress commented that the author “brings his considerable skills to nonfiction, producing a solid biography.” Bell is also author of the nonfiction book Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that the book about the discoverer of oxygen and one of the leading scientific minds during the Enlightenment “will appeal most to readers interested in the vibrant life and tragic death of a key figure in the history of science.”
In 2009 Bell edited the short story collection New Stories from the South 2009: The Year’s Best. The collection of stories from the American South highlight its growing diversity. The stories cover topics ranging from confrontations over infidelity and the confluence of sexuality and religion to challenging gender roles.
Reviewing the collection in an article in Voice of Youth Advocates, Matthew Weaver suggested that “if the book does nothing more than usher readers to embrace George Singleton … then that’s still a gift of immeasurable worth.” A critic writing in Kirkus Reviews thought that the collection is “just uneven enough to make seeking out its several gems an entertaining and rewarding reading experience.” Booklist critic Mark Knoblauch opined that “taken together, these stories portray an evolving face for southern letters.”
Bell returned to novels with 2009’s Devil’s Dream. The novel centers on U.S. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his life primarily between 1845 and 1865. Marked personally by U.S. Union General Sherman as one to take down, Forrest led a complicated life. Despite helping to found the Ku Klux Klan and having a history of violently abusing slaves, he had a black mistress and even children with her. His wife and son are also conflicted with their father’s dual life. The novel’s war sequences are told primarily from the standpoint of Haitian wanderer Henri, who joined Forrest’s troops and helps them by communicating to the ghosts of the fallen soldiers.
MostlyFiction Book Reviews contributor Roger Brunyate commented that “Bell presents his protagonist with sympathy and understanding, and he wisely stops short of Forrest’s postwar role in founding the KKK, until he came to denounce it as a terrorist organization. What he gives us is a flawed but honest individual of irresistible personal magnetism, a rough-tongued leader who is impossible not to follow.” Todd VanDerWerff observed in A.V. Club that the novel “contains marvelous images and moments, particularly when Bell evokes the eeriness of the 19th-century South, but the overall effect is that of being swept away by a tide and out to sea, struggling all the way.” Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Robert Goolrick reported being frustrated by having to look up so many words while reading, stating: “I just wish that in the heat of battle, about which Bell writes with passion but an absolute lack of variety, I hadn’t had to keep running to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up ‘widdershins,’ ‘osnaburg’ and ‘barracoon,’ words that stop us dead in our tracks and make us feel like we’re playing Scrabble with Yosemite Sam.” Library Journal reviewer Shaunna Hunter called the account “highly recommended” and noted that it is “engaging and well written enough for broad appeal.”
In 2011 Bell published the novel The Color of Night. Nevada casino card dealer Mae is troubled by the television footage of an ex-lover of hers caught in the September 11 wreckage. She finds solace in meaningless sexual encounters while secretly enjoying the images of destruction. Mae also reveals a dark past of violence and wanders the desert with a rifle.
Reviewing the novel in Library Journal, Ashanti White claimed: “Wonderfully capturing the essence of a troubled woman, Bell’s novel will appeal to … readers of psychological novels.” Again writing in Booklist, Seaman described the book as a “sharp blade of a novel,” adding that “every word is weaponized as Bell stands at the portal to chthonic evil.”
Bell published Behind the Moon: A Fever Dream in 2017. Julie skips school to go on an overnight motorcycle trip into the badlands with Jamal, a close friend who she hopes will see her in a more romantic way. Jamal’s two friends have ulterior motives about this trip and drug Julie’s water with a hallucinatory substance so that she will be more compliant in making a pornographic video. While tripping, Julie flees and falls into a cave, where it takes Jamal two days to get her out. After a week in a coma, she awakes to find that those two thugs are threatening to kill her and Jamal if they tell the full story. In a parallel story, Marissa looks for the daughter she gave up for adoption seventeen years earlier. Marissa believes it is Julie. Together with Jamal, the pair seek the help of Native Americans to enter the hallucinogenic world of Julie’s coma to guide her back to the real world.
Booklist contributor Donna Seaman suggested that young adults would “be captivated by Bell’s teen characters, the dangers they face, and the hallucinatory time travel.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor reasoned that the author “is a gifted veteran, and though the more realistic half of this novel is more compelling and affecting than the mystic fever dream, the whole is lyrical, ambitious, and well worth reading.” In a review in the Boston Globe, Michael Patrick Brady observed: “As Marissa’s story grows increasingly less coherent, there are fewer and fewer touchstones that readers can use to orient themselves. The story splinters off into tangents that feel more like tricks or traps than meaningful shifts in the narrative’s point of view. The experiment overtakes the novel, and while Bell can be commended for taking risks, the results of the experiment prove to be inconclusive.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly commented that “Julie’s journey through the spirit world is more difficult to follow. … Nonetheless, it doesn’t diminish this powerful, mind-bending work.”
Bell focuses on the work of fellow author Robert Stone–who died in 2015–in a pair of books from 2020. He serves as editor for The Eye You See With: Selected Nonfiction. Here Bell gathers nonfiction pieces Stone wrote during his career as a novelist, dividing the prose into three groups: war reporting, writings on social change, and literary reviews and writings on the art of fiction. A Publishers Weekly reviewer termed this a “sterling collection of essays on literature, culture, politics, and war.” The reviewer added: “Fans of Stone’s novels will especially appreciate the insight, but any reader of narrative nonfiction will find plenty of interest in this fine collection.”
Bell turns biographer in his 2020 work, Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone. Stone was considered one of the great American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in 1937, he grew up largely unsupervised on the streets of New York, the child of his schizophrenic single mother. Stone joined the Navy in the 1950s, and, as the adage has it, saw the world, from Havana to Antarctica. Following his service, he studied writing at Stanford University, falling in with another iconic American writer, Ken Kesey, and his hipster gang of Merry Pranksters. Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, set in New Orleans, won the author the William Faulkner Award for best first novel and set him on a path to becoming a professional writer. Stone worked as a correspondent in Vietnam during the American war there, and used the experience for his hard-hitting second novel, Dog Soldiers, a co-winner of the National Book Award in 1975. Soon, Stone was compared to other famous authors including Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, and Joseph Conrad. Further novels included A Flag for Sunrise, from 1981, and which was set in Central America; Children of Light, from 1986; Outerbridge Reach, from 1992; Damascus Gate, from 1998; Bay of Souls, from 2003; and Death of the Black-Haired Girl, 2013. Overall, Stone lived a full but sometimes troubled life. He had been married for fifty-five years when he died in 2015 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and was also survived by two adult children. A close personal friend as well as an admirer of Stone’s work, Bell is the authorized biographer and provides both a detailed account of the writer’s professional life as well as his private life, not overlooking Stone’s personal problems, including drug addiction.
Reviewing Child of Light, a Publishers Weekly contributor felt that though Bell offers an “unnecessary level of detail,” still he “provides a solid biography of an important American novelist.” A Kirkus Reviews critic also had praise, terming this a “[c]omprehensive life of the late novelist Robert Stone (1937-2015), victim and chronicler of an excessive era.” The critic added: “For all Stone’s flaws, Bell makes a solid case for the importance of his work. Perhaps not the last word on Stone but essential for students and fans of the writer’s works.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2003.
PERIODICALS
America’s Civil War, September 1, 2010, Gordon Berg, review of Devil’s Dream, p. 70.
Booklist, April 15, 1993, Donna Seaman, review of Save Me, Joe Louis, pp. 1468-1469; September 1, 1995, Donna Seaman, review of All Souls’ Rising, p. 4; January 1, 1997, Michael Cart, review of Ten Indians, p. 834; September 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of The Stone That the Builder Refused, p. 179; February 1, 2007, Donna Seaman, review of Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, p. 21; September 1, 2009, Mark Knoblauch, review of New Stories from the South 2009: The Year’s Best, p. 39; November 15, 2009, Donna Seaman, review of Devil’s Dream, p. 19; November 1, 2010, Donna Seaman, review of The Color of Night, p. 22; May 1, 2017, Donna Seaman, review of Behind the Moon: A Fever Dream, p. 55.
Boston Globe, June 9, 2017, Michael Patrick Brady, review of Behind the Moon.
Chemistry and Industry, April 23, 2007, “Victim of the Reign of Terror,” p. 29.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2004, review of The Stone That the Builder Refused, p. 927; October 15, 2006, review of Toussaint Louverture, p. 1052; August 1, 2009, review of New Stories from the South 2009; October 1, 2009, review of Devil’s Dream; April 1, 2017, review of Behind the Moon; November 15, 2019, review of Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone.
Library Journal, October 15, 2004, Robert E. Brown, review of The Stone That the Builder Refused, p. 52; March 1, 2007, Boyd Childress, review of Toussaint Louverture, p. 91; October 15, 2009, Shaunna Hunter, review of Devil’s Dream, p. 63; October 15, 2010, review of The Color of Night, p. 17; February 1, 2011, Ashanti White, review of The Color of Night, p. 50.
Nashville Scene, November 5, 2009, Maria Browning, “In His New Novel, Madison Smartt Bell Tackles the Confederacy’s Most Controversial Son, Nathan Bedford Forrest.”
New Statesman, February 9, 1996, Brian Morton, review of All Souls’ Rising, pp. 37-38.
New York Times Book Review, October 29, 1995, John Vernon, review of All Souls’ Rising, p. 12; November 22, 2009, Brenda Wineapple, review of Devil’s Dream, p. 16.
Paris Review, May 8, 2017, Andrew Ervin, “Relationships Normally Beyond Our Knowing: An Interview with Madison Smartt Bell.”
Publishers Weekly, August 28, 1995, review of All Souls’ Rising, p. 102; November 6, 1995, review of All Souls’ Rising, p. 58; August 26, 1996, review of Ten Indians, p. 75; September 20, 2004, review of The Stone That the Builder Refused, p. 43; May 9, 2005, review of Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution, p. 60; November 6, 2006, review of Toussaint Louverture, p. 50; June 22, 2009, review of New Stories from the South 2009, p. 32; September 7, 2009, review of Devil’s Dream, p. 26; March 27, 2017, review of Behind the Moon.
Time, October 28, 1996, John Skow, review of Ten Indians, p. 110.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), May 30, 1993, Andy Solomon, review of Save Me, Joe Louis, section 14, p. 6.
Voice of Youth Advocates, August 1, 2010, Matthew Weaver, review of New Stories from the South 2009, p. 242.
Washington Post Book World, November 28, 1995, Ken Ringle, “Ripples from an Island; In Haiti’s Blood-Red Past, a Lesson in Black & White,” pp. C1-2; December 12, 2009, Robert Goolrick, review of Devil’s Dream.
Weekly Standard, March 19, 2007, “Black Napoleon; the Rise and Fall of Haiti’s Liberating Tyrant.”
ONLINE
American Scientist Online, http://www.americanscientist.org/ (August 1, 2007), “The Bookshelf Talks with Madison Smartt Bell.”
A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com/ (November 25, 2009), Todd VanDerWerff, review of Devil’s Dream.
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ (December 12, 2019), “Madison Smartt Bell.”
Goucher College, http://www.goucher.edu/ (December 12, 2019), author profile.
Historical Novels, http://www.historicalnovels.info/ (November 4, 2009), “Madison Smartt Bell Interview.”
MostlyFiction Book Reviews, http://www.mostlyfiction.com/ (November 26, 2010), Roger Brunyate, review of Devil’s Dream.
New York Times’ Arts Beat blog, http://artsbeats.blogs.nytimes.com/ (January 7, 2009), Gregory Cowles, “Living with Music: Madison Smartt Bell.”
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (November 4, 2019), review of The Eye You See With: Selected Nonfiction; (December 4, 2019), review of Child of Light.
Madison Smartt Bell
(b.1957)
Madison Smartt Bell is a critically acclaimed writer of more than a dozen novels and story collections, as well as numerous essays and reviews for publications such as Harper's and the New York Times Book Review. His books have been finalists for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, among other honors.
Genres: Mystery
New Books
March 2020
(hardback)
Child of Light
Series
Haitian Revolutionary trilogy
1. All Souls' Rising (1995) (with Mark Mitchell)
2. Master of the Crossroads (2000)
3. The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004)
Novels
The Washington Square Ensemble (1983)
Waiting for the End of the World (1985)
Straight Cut (1986)
The Year of Silence (1987)
Soldier's Joy (1989)
Doctor Sleep (1991)
Save Me, Joe Louis (1993)
Ten Indians (1996)
Anything Goes (2002)
Devil's Dream (2009)
The Color of Night (2011)
Behind the Moon (2017)
Collections
Zero db (1987)
Barking Man (1991)
Zig Zag Wanderer (2015)
Novellas
Boy With a Coin (2011)
Prey ( (2012)
Non fiction
George Garrett (1990)
Narrative Design (1998)
Lavoisier in the Year One (2005)
Toussaint Louverture (2007)
Charm City (2007)
Child of Light (2020)
Madison Smartt Bell
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Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004.
Contents
1
Early life and education
2
Career
3
Personal life
4
Awards
5
Bibliography
6
References
7
External links
Early life and education[edit]
Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Madison Smartt Bell lived in New York City, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award.[1]
Career[edit]
Bell is a Professor of English at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, where he was Director of the Creative Writing Program from 1998 to 2004.[2]
Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's,[3] The New York Review of Books,[4] the New York Times Book Review.[5]
His papers are held at Princeton.[6]
Personal life[edit]
Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires. They have a daughter, Celia Dovell Bell.[7]
Awards[edit]
All Souls' Rising, a novel about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award. It won the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race.
He won a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[8]
Bibliography[edit]
The Washington Square Ensemble (novel) (Viking Press, 1983) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1984)
Waiting For The End Of The World (novel) (Ticknor & Fields, 1985) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1986)
Straight Cut (novel) (Ticknor & Fields, 1986) (Penguin mass-market paperback, 1987) (re-issued by Hard Case Crime in 2006)
Zero db (short fiction) (Ticknor & Fields, 1987) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1988)
The Year Of Silence (novel) (Ticknor & Fields, 1987) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1989)
Soldier's Joy (novel) (Ticknor & Fields, 1989) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1990)
Barking Man (short fiction) (Ticknor & Fields, 1990) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1991) (Quality Paperback Club, 1991)
Doctor Sleep (novel) (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1992)(adapted for film as "Close Your Eyes" (2002))
Save Me, Joe Louis (novel) (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1994)
All Souls' Rising (novel) (Pantheon, 1995) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1996)
Ten Indians (novel) (Pantheon, 1996) (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series, 1997)
Narrative Design: A Writer's Guide to Structure (textbook) (W.W. Norton, 1997)
Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form (trade paperback edition) (Norton, 2000)
Master of the Crossroads (novel, continuation of All Souls' Rising) (Pantheon, 2000)
Anything Goes (Pantheon, 2002)
The Stone That the Builder Refused (novel, continuation of Master of the Crossroads) (Pantheon, released Nov 9, 2004)
Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution (nonfiction) (Norton, released June 13, 2005)
Freedom's Gate: A Brief Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture (non-fiction) (Pantheon, 2007)
Charm City (Crown: 2007)
Devil's Dream (novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest and the American Civil War) (Pantheon, 2009)
The Color of Night (Vintage, 2011)
Zig Zag Wanderer (Concord Free Press, 2013)
Behind the Moon (City Lights Publishers, 2017)
Madison Smartt Bell is a critically acclaimed writer of more than a dozen novels and story collections, as well as numerous essays and reviews for publications such as Harper's and the New York Times Book Review. His books have been finalists for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, among other honors.
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of thirteen 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.
Bell's eighth novel, All Soul's Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. All Souls Rising, along with the second and third novels of his Haitian Revolutionary trilogy, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone That The Builder Refused, is available in a uniform edition from Vintage Contemporaries. Toussaint Louverture A Biography was published by Pantheon in 2007. Devil's Dream ,a novel based on the career of Confederate Cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest, was published by Pantheon in 2009. Bell's latest novel, The Color of Night, appeared from Vintage Contemporaries in April 2011.
Born and raised in Tennessee, he has lived in New York and in London and now lives in Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B 1979) and Hollins College (M.A. 1981), he has taught in various creative writing programs, including theIowa Writers' Workshop and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Since 1984 he has taught in the Goucher College Creative Program, where he is currently Professor of English, along with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires. Bell served as Director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College from 1999 to 2008. In 2008 he received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Questions or comments? Send email to mbell@goucher.edu
QUOTE:
"[c]omprehensive life of the late novelist Robert Stone (1937-2015), victim and chronicler of an excessive era." The critic added: "For all Stone's flaws, Bell makes a solid case for the importance of his work. Perhaps not the last word on Stone but essential for students and fans of the writer's works."
Bell, Madison Smartt CHILD OF LIGHT Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 3, 17 ISBN: 978-0-385-54160-2
Comprehensive life of the late novelist Robert Stone (1937-2015), victim and chronicler of an excessive era.
"Nothing is free." So, writes novelist Bell (Behind the Moon, 2017, etc.), ran a mantra of Stone's. It's fitting. Stone grew up fatherless, with a mother who may have been schizophrenic, in and out of orphanages and shelters, and he responded with a need to fight for every achievement. So he did, joining a gang, showing up drunk to high school--and somehow arriving in Wallace Stegner's famed writing workshop at Stanford. There, Stone fell in with the likes of Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and spent much of the 1960s zonked out, lending irony to the subtitle of his memoir Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. But as Bell clearly shows, Stone was still capable of marvels: His Vietnam War novel Dog Soldiers, published in 1974, was "regarded as the definitive work of fiction on the war by readers who found it both curious and curiously appropriate that only a small percentage of its action took place in Vietnam, and practically none of it in combat." Other hallmark novels were Children of Light and A Flag for Sunrise, a Pulitzer finalist. Stone arrived at a state of solvency and relative fame in midcareer, hampered only by his prodigious appetites: The end of the 1990s found him suffering from many illnesses, some self-wrought, as his "drug and alcohol problems were still hovering at crisis level." Bell's approach seems formulaic after a time: He writes of a period of time, offers a sometimes-too-detailed summary of the plot of a given book or story, surveys the criticism (Michiko Kakutani being a special bete noire), and finally looks at the till. It's a lot of inside baseball. Though perhaps too much for civilian readers, the business end in particular will fascinate working writers. For all Stone's flaws, Bell makes a solid case for the importance of his work.
Perhaps not the last word on Stone but essential for students and fans of the writer's works.
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Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bell, Madison Smartt: CHILD OF LIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A605549664/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2dccb6ec. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A605549664
QUOTE:
"unnecessary level of detail," still he "provides a solid biography of an important American novelist.
Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone
Madison Smartt Bell. Doubleday, $35 (608p) ISBN 978-0-38554-160-2
Biographer and novelist Bell (Freedom’s Gate) meticulously recounts the life of Robert Stone (1937–2015), whose novels “chronicled the peak and the decline of a great many aspects of U.S. world dominance” through troubled, sometimes autobiographical characters. Raised in New York City, Stone spent much of his childhood in a school run by the Marist Brothers religious order while his schizophrenic mother—Stone never knew his father—was institutionalized. Though he lost his faith, this exposure to Catholicism shaped both his worldview and work. A Navy stint initiated a lifelong penchant for travel to often-fraught locales, including Saigon and Jerusalem, which informed his books. His first novel, 1967’s A Hall of Mirrors, a dark portrait of demagoguery in New Orleans, was an instant success. His second, 1974’s Dog Soldiers, about heroin smuggling during the Vietnam War, won the National Book Award. A friend of Stone and his wife, Janice, Bell draws extensively on conversations with both, but doesn’t allow that closeness to compromise his accounts of Stone’s personal struggles, including with drug addiction. However, an unnecessary level of detail (Bell even gives the names of the dying Stone’s physical therapists) distracts from the book’s focus on cementing Stone’s reputation. Nonetheless, Bell provides a solid biography of an important American novelist. (Mar.)
Reviewed on : 12/04/2019
Release date: 03/17/2020
QUOTE:
"sterling collection of essays on literature, culture, politics, and war." The reviewer added: "Fans of Stone’s novels will especially appreciate the insight, but any reader of narrative nonfiction will find plenty of interest in this fine collection."
Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27 (384p) ISBN 978-0-618-38624-6
Novelist Bell (Behind the Moon) presents a sterling collection of essays on literature, culture, politics, and war by the late Stone (1937–2015), best known for his National Book Award–winning novel Dog Soldiers. Spanning the 1970s to the aughts, the essays demonstrate Stone’s remarkable capacity for capturing an era’s ethos while making larger, and still current, points. His 1993 essay “Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You” blasts the hypocrisy of the armed forces in discharging gay service members but not preventing the sexual harassment and assault of female personnel. In “The Reason for Stories,” Stone argues that art, and storytelling in particular, is inherently moral in its implications. The standout selection is “Keeping the Future at Bay,” on the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans. It’s a nuanced piece which addresses the issue of gentrification, steeped in Stone’s personal reminiscence of selling encyclopedias door-to-door in the city in the ’60s. Throughout, Bell provides useful biographical information, which in combination with the essays provides a vivid portrait of Stone’s background and guiding philosophy. Fans of Stone’s novels will especially appreciate the insight, but any reader of narrative nonfiction will find plenty of interest in this fine collection. Agent: Neil Olson, Massie & McQuilken. (Mar.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on : 11/04/2019
Release date: 03/01/2020