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Madison Jones was born in Nashville, Tenn., on March 21, 1925. The son of a successful Presbyterian small businessman, he spent his early years surrounded by family, living a privileged life in suburban Nashville. When Jones was 14 his father purchased Sycamore Farm in the hill country 25 miles north of the city. This event was to forever change the course of his life. At the age of 17, Jones dropped out of Vanderbilt University to become a farmer. He moved to Sycamore Farm where he lived for a year and a half. During this time Jones learned the ways of country. He learned how to farm tobacco, corn and hay and how to raise cattle and hogs. More importantly, he learned the ways of its people, white and black. His time spent on the farm came to later play an important role in his writing. "I loved the place," Jones said. "It was wonderful, very beautiful. A good deal of my writing was centered there. It furnished a lot of the scenery and a lot of the people." When Jones was 19 his father bought another farm near Nashville. Jones lived here while finishing up his schooling at Vanderbilt. It was at Vanderbilt that Jones met and studied under Donald Davidson, a member of the Fugitive group, an influential literary movement in the South. Jones met another influential teacher while completing graduate school at the University of Florida. Andrew Lytle, also a member of the Fugitive group, became his mentor. Lytle's novel, "I'll Take My Stand," had an important effect on Jones's life and his writing. "It was a very influential book," Jones said. "It was thought to be important and still is." While at the University of Florida, Jones met Shailah McEvilley. The couple was married in 1951, the same year Jones received his master's degree. He began work on his first novel, "The Innocent", while at his first job as an English instructor at the University of Miami in Ohio. "I didn't have an outline in my head or on paper either," Jones said. "I started with a man in a certain situation and though I had some vague plans before of what such things would happen, I mostly kind of made it up as I went along." Jones said once he has created a character and setting, the stories seem to write themselves. "You start off with a particular man and a certain particular situation and some kind of idea of what he's up to. "You are guided in terms of what can and can not happen and what kind of man would do certain things under certain circumstances. "Knowing that much, where he lived and what life was like around him, gives you to some extent a kind of guide as to what you should do. There is kind of a logic to it," Jones said. After leaving the University of Miami, Jones taught at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for a year. In 1956, Jones got an offer to come to Auburn and teach creative writing. "I came, and I stayed," Jones said. He said he was partial to Auburn because it was more rural and traditional. "All of my feelings tend to be Southern, and Auburn was as Southern as I could get," Jones said. Jones, who is currently a professor emeritus, served as a professor of English and an alumni writer-in-residence until 1987. He said he enjoyed his years as a professor but always knew that he was primarily a writer. "The main thing for me was writing fiction," Jones said. Jones received several fellowships throughout his years. In 1954, he received The Sewanee Review Fellowship, in 1968 he received the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and in 1973 he received the Guggenheim Fellowship. Jones can remember years of writing with a pencil and paper. "I think of how much time I wasted doing that," Jones said. "After I wrote it, I had to rewrite it. I was a two finger typist, so that was slow work." Since his retirement Jones has continued to write, though no longer with a pencil and pad. His latest novel, "To the Winds", was published in 1996. He has also been working in fine arts. A number of clay heads adorn the Jones' living room. The busts, constructed by Jones, reveal his wide range of interests. He has figures from Greek mythology, including Hector from "The Illiad" and a fawn. In the Jones' den, paintings and photographs line barely visible walls. Some of the paintings are the work of Shailah, who is a skilled painter. Others have been crafted by Jones himself. Jones seems content in his Alabama home, though he feels some of the uniquely Southern qualities seem to be slipping away from the region. He longs for the tradition and morality of the old South, and he hopes that the culture, which is so often misunderstood, is not forgotten or lost. "There's a certain many things I like historically about the South, certain attitudes, a tragic sense, a sense of history and a kind of historical consciousness," Jones said. "It makes one able to participate in the past. It makes you realize that things that happened 50 or 75 years ago happened to people of a different kind of consciousness than we have now."

Somewhere outside of Auburn, a glittering road rolls past cow pastures and sprawling trailer parks. On a red dirt drive, not far from the road, a simple gray house lays nestled between pine trees and hardwoods. Inside are the signs of a life well lived. Photographs of family and friends line the walls alongside relics and paintings. These are symbols of beliefs and traditions. This is the home of Madison Jones, an award-winning Alabama author who believes the South is fertile ground for a novelist. Jones, both nationally and internationally acclaimed, has written nine novels. He is a recipient of the Harper Lee Award, the T.S. Elliot Award and the Micheal Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction. In 1982, he was inducted into Alabama Academy of Distinguished Authors, and in 1989 he was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Jones, a retired English professor, lives with his wife Shailah and their two dogs, Daisy and Sadie. They have five children, 12 grandchildren and two step-grandchildren. The author appears comfortable in green and blue flannel. White tufts of hair and a neatly trimmed beard frame his face, and his solemn expression wavers only when he speaks. He sits in a cream-colored armchair and relays the stories of his own life and times. His words are strung out softly in a slow Southern accent. "I like its (the South's) history. It's interesting: the pain and sorrow. It has solidified a kind of Southern culture," Jones said. "It's my people, that's all." Jones' novels address traditional Southern concerns including racial tension, fundamentalism, small towns and loyalty to the Confederacy. Guilt, pride and the conflict of past and present are also common themes in his writing. "He draws on his own history and experience," said Bert Hitchcock, a professor of English at Auburn University and former colleague of Jones. "These are things that come out of the life he has known in the South." His themes and characters are uniquely Southern, but his message about humanity and the human condition is universal. Literary scholars compare his work to that of classic Greek tragedians as well as more modern writers such as William Faulkner. The characters in Jones' novels are an important aspect of his writing. They tell the story through their own words and experience. Ward Allen, a longtime friend and former colleague of Jones, explained why he believes Jones is able to craft his characters so well. "One of the things that makes him so good is that he hears people's voices," Allen said. Allen recalled a time when a friend complained of no longer being able to hear the voice of a deceased loved one. Allen thought back and realized that he too could not recall the voices of his past. When he brought the issue up to Jones, Allen recalls his friend thinking for a moment before commenting, "The last thing I forget about a person is their voice." "He notices everything," Allen said. "He may not seem like he's paying attention, but he is."

Madison Jones, novelist, was born in Nashville and grew up on a farm located on Franklin Pike. After military service in and immediately after World War II, Jones completed a B.A. at Vanderbilt University, where he studied under Monroe Spears and Donald Davidson. He earned a M.A. at the University of Florida, where he studied fiction writing under Andrew Nelson Lytle, and then completed additional graduate work. In 1954 Jones won a Sewanee Review fellowship and taught at the University of Tennessee (1955-56). In 1956 he began his long teaching career at Auburn University, from which he retired as writer-in-residence in 1987. Jones and his wife, Shailah, continue to live in Auburn, Alabama, but the country of his imagination is Tennessee, where he began his life and his career. From the beginning, Jones seemed to realize that the novel was his natural mode. He has written short stories, and indeed, some of his novels, including his penultimate one, To the Winds, are constructed of sequences or chapters that can stand alone as stories. He also has written the novellas An Exile (1967) and Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light (1997). But, from The Innocent (1957) through Last Things (1989) and To the Winds (1996), Jones has proved himself a quintessential novelist. In addition to fiction, he occasionally publishes criticism in the Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. Although comedy plays a role in his fiction, Jones's view of the world and man's place in it is tragic. There is humor in such sequences as "Zoo" in To the Winds, and Jones's version of frontier humor is anti-pastoral, recalling the comedy of William Faulkner. But Jones has an unflinching view of man's depravity and its consequences. William Hoffman correctly views Jones as a bedrock Christian whose characters remain flawed and whose submission to sin requires punishment. Jones repeats this pattern throughout his novels, although the tragic vision of Nashville 1864 is more nearly that of communal rather than individual fate. As Allen Tate recognized, Jones seems to have been most influenced by Thomas Hardy. Jones's career has seen many vicissitudes. First published by such large trade houses as Harcourt Brace, Viking, and Doubleday, Jones's work is now distributed by smaller houses such as Longstreet Press and J. S. Sanders and Company. An Exile was made into a movie, though an undistinguished one. Hollywood has purchased an option on what critics consider his best work, A Cry of Absence (1971) and actively considered Nashville 1864. Neither work has yet been filmed. Jones exhibits a rich and exact sense of place and a keen ear for spoken language, including various southern idioms. He is a natural maker of strong scenes and moving sequences of consequential actions. His work, like that of others of his generation, has not achieved the popularity or respect it deserves. A special issue of Chattahoochie Review (Volume 18, Fall 1996) has helped to repair the critical neglect that has often accompanied his fiction. Madison Jones is a novelist of enduring power, and his vision of humankind is illumined by a durable fire.

Bibliography

Fiction
The Innocent (1957)
Forest of the Night (1960)
A Buried Land (sometimes I Walk the Line) (1963)
An Exile (1967)
A Cry of Absence (1971)
Passage Through Gehenna (1978)
Season of the Strangler (1982)
Last Things (1989)
To the Winds (1996)
Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light (1997)
The Adventures of Douglas Bragg (2008)

Non-Fiction
History of the Tennessee State Dental Association (with Thomas Davidson Dow, 1958) Short Fiction
The Guide and Other Stories (master's thesis, University of Florida, 1951)