American · b. 1933
David Madden (born July 25, 1933, in Knoxville, Tennessee) is an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright, and literary critic. As a teenager he worked as an usher at Knoxville's Bijou Theatre, an experience that became the basis for his best-known novel, Bijou (1974), a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection that Stephen King later named among the books he most admired. Madden studied at the University of Tennessee, San Francisco State University, and the Yale School of Drama before publishing his debut novel, The Beautiful Greed, in 1961. He went on to write more than a dozen novels, including Cassandra Singing, The Suicide's Wife, and the Civil War novel Sharpshooter, alongside influential works of literary scholarship such as A Primer of the Novel. In 1968 he joined Louisiana State University as writer-in-residence, later founding its Creative Writing Program and the United States Civil War Center, and retired in 2008 as Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing Emeritus.