Madden, David W. 1950- (David William Madden)

PERSONAL:

Born September 10, 1950, in San Francisco, CA; son of John Joseph (an "appellate conferee, IRS") and Esther Calvert Pearce (a homemaker) Madden; married Mary Virginia Davis (an administrative assistant), March 19, 1977; children: Anne Elizabeth, Margaret Kathleen. Ethnicity: "Irish-American." Education: Attended St. Mary's College, 1968-70; University of California, Davis, B.A., 1972, M.A., 1974, Ph.D., 1980. Politics: Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: Music, computers, golf.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, California State University, Sacramento, CA 95819. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, lecturer, 1977-78; University of California, Davis, lecturer, 1980-82; California State University, Sacramento, professor of English, 1982—. Guest speaker at François Rabelais University, 2003.

MEMBER:

American Conference for Irish Studies, Irish American Cultural Institute.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fulbright grant for Italy, 1977-78; various research awards, California State University, Sacramento, 1990-94, Outstanding Teaching Award, 1999, and Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award, 2006-07.

WRITINGS:

Understanding Paul West, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1993.

Critical Essays on Thomas Berger, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1995.

Contributor to books, including Fiction in English, edited by Ian Ousby, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1998; The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television, edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Progozy, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1998; and to reference works. Contributor of articles and reviews to scholarly journals, including Critique, Studies in American Humor, and Modern Fiction Studies, and to newspapers. Guest editor, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1991 and 1997.

SIDELIGHTS:

David W. Madden once told CA: "I write out of a sense of sheer delight and interest in my subjects and the process itself. For me, it is positively invigorating."

He later added: "The influences on my work are so varied it is difficult to assess them all. Particular writers have affected me profoundly, among them James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Phillip Roth, Edna O'Brien, John Banville, Thomas Berger, and Paul West, to name a few. Much of my research and writing has centered on modern American and Irish writers. In the case of Thomas Berger, I developed an interest years ago under the tutelage of the late Brom Weber, which led later to my editing a collection of scholarship in which Berger generously participated in an extended interview and granted me the rights to publish (for the first time) his first of four plays.

"My scholarship on novelist Paul West began as a happy accident: I was commissioned to contribute to a survey of post-World War II writers and chose West's Rat Man of Paris, a novel which I have often taught and which remains my favorite of his. From there I wrote other articles and reviews, guest-edited a half-issue of Teview of Contemporary Fiction, and then wrote the first and to date only book-length study in English of his works. West continues to fascinate and inspire me, and I can think of few writers who match his fecundity of imagination and pyrotechnic style.

"My motivations for writing are entirely personal and subjective, and quite simply I pursue whatever interests fascinate me. Thus, I have written about literature, rock music, and cultural and historical events, though literature remains my enduring passion. I have stated before that I write out of a sense of sheer delight and interest in my subjects and the process itself, an undertaking that is positively invigorating. That has not and never will change."