James A. Perkins

Black Jack Burden!

Randy Hendricks

For four decades, Knoxville, Tennessee, native David Madden has been writing compelling bestsellers, such as Bijou and The Suicide's Wife, as well as highly respected literary novels, such as Sharpshooter. David Madden: A Writer for All Genres is the first full-length critical work devoted to the whole of Madden's oeuvre, and collectively the essays make the case that the attention paid to Madden's novels has overshadowed his innovative work as a critic, poet, short-story writer, and dramatist. Madden is indeed a writer for all genres--poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism. David Madden: A Writer for all Genres will introduce a new generation of readers to an important and multitalented writer and begin a well-deserved, serious discussion of his place in the American literary tradition.

A Writer for All Genres

David Madden

Jeffrey J. Folks

Since the end of World War II, the South has experienced a greater awareness of growth and of its accompanying tensions than other regions of the United States. The rapid change that climaxed with the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights demonstrations, and Watergate has forced the traditional South to come to terms with social upheaval. As the essays collected in Southern Writers at Century's End point out, southern writing: since 1975 reflects the confusion and violence that have characterized late-twentieth-century public culture. These essays consider the work of twenty-one of the foremost southern writers whose most important fiction has appeared in the last quarter of this century. As the region's contemporary writers have begun to gain a wide audience, critics have begun to distinguish what Hugh Holman has called "the fresh, the vital, and the new" in southern literary culture. Southern Writers at Century's End is the first volume to take an extensive look at the current generation of southern writers. Authors considered include: James Lee Burke, Fred Chappell, Robert Drake, Andre Dubus, Clyde Edgerton, Richard Ford, Kaye Gibbons, John Grisham, Barry Hannah, Mary Hood, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Richard Marius, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Tim McLaurin, T.R. Pearson, Lee Smith, Anne Tyle,r Alice Walker, and James Wilcox.

Southern Writers at Century's End

Ji-moon Suh

Chi-Mun So

The bitter realities of a war that pitted brother against brother and lingers on to this day.

Poems of the Korean War

Brother Enemy

One of the most striking parts of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men is Chapter 4, in which narrator Jack Burden tells the story of his distant relative Cass Mastern. A Confederate soldier, Mastern betrays his best friend by falling in love with the man's wife and then out of guilt tries repeatedly to get killed in battle but ironically becomes a hero for his daring, before finally attaining a mortal wound. In The Cass Mastern Material, James A. Perkins fully explores how this episode supplies the crucial piece to a puzzle surrounding Warren's novel, tracing the story's evolution through several versions and genres over almost twenty years. Found here are both the earliest, short-story rendition of the Cass Mastern episode, originally published in 1944, and Warren's final dramatic version, completed in 1961 and now made available in print for the first time. The play was finally staged in 1999, and Perkins appends related letters, production notes, and an interview that provide a context for understanding the work's importance in Warren's career. "I have always felt that the section is central to [All the King's Men]," Warren wrote, concerning the Cass Mastern material. In a revolutionary reading of the novel, Perkins argues that the section provides the key to unlocking the mystery of Jack Burden's paternity. This unique volume affords a view of Warren's restless creative process and throws new light on the story that formed the crux of his greatest novel -- a story he apparently never felt he had exhausted.

James A. Perkins

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