Madison Jones

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Madison Percy Jones was a novelist born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1925. He published almost a dozen novels, and was considered "one of the major figures of contemporary southern letters"

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.

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. He is regarded as having an "essentially religious outlook"; his later work is much dar...