Madison Smartt Bell Books in Order

Drug dealer Johnny B. Goode and his associates struggle to maintain their business around Washington Square Park over one weekend. Their interwoven accounts reveal lives shaped by addiction, faith, criminal history, and friendship on New York's margins.

Bell traces the history of Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management from its early origins through 1984. The institutional account follows the development of a business school and the emergence of its approach to graduate management education.

Bellevue Hospital photographer Clarence Dmitri Larkin becomes increasingly drawn to New York's troubled outsiders. His drift through the city's underground brings him into contact with a radical group planning to place an atomic bomb beneath Times Square.

Film editor Tracy Bateman accepts a suspiciously lucrative job in Rome from his friend and rival Kevin Carter. What appears to be an editing assignment draws Tracy and his estranged wife into a dangerous drug-smuggling scheme.

Marian's troubled life and fatal overdose connect a group of New Yorkers whose experiences intersect with hers. Shifting viewpoints and movements through time reveal how addiction, intimacy, and isolation shape both her story and those left behind.

Eleven stories follow people confronting irrationality and madness across the American South, lower Manhattan, and the nineteenth-century Great Plains. Their unsettled lives reveal how ordinary surroundings can become charged with obsession, instability, and disturbing departures from familiar behavior.

Vietnam veteran Thomas Laidlaw returns to his family's deserted Tennessee farm seeking peace through rural routines and bluegrass music. Renewing a friendship with a Black childhood companion draws him into a confrontation with local Ku Klux Klansmen.

Ten stories explore the lives of people pushed to the margins of American society. Bell follows their struggles through a varied fictional landscape, examining the hopes, difficulties, and human connections that endure beneath their unsettled circumstances.

Insomniac hypnotherapist Adrian Strother treats patients in London and occasionally assists Scotland Yard. Investigating a killer who targets young girls forces him to confront his own unsettled past and a man's obsession with achieving immortality.

Tennessee drifter Macrae joins petty thief Charlie in robbing New Yorkers at cash machines. Their early success leads to increasingly dangerous crimes, and Macrae begins questioning whether he can escape the violence of their partnership.

The opening novel of Bell's Haitian Revolution trilogy follows enslaved people, colonists, and others caught in the uprising against French rule. Toussaint Louverture emerges amid conflicts over freedom, race, class, and the colony's brutal plantation system.

Child psychiatrist Mike Devlin opens a tae kwon do school in a Black Baltimore neighborhood, hoping to help local teenagers. His students' involvement in rival drug gangs and his daughter's growing connection to them complicate his ambitions.

Bell examines twelve short stories to explain how writers organize time, plot, character, and point of view. Detailed analyses and notes on language encourage readers to evaluate narrative choices and find structures suited to their own fiction.

Toussaint Louverture navigates rival armies and shifting alliances as the Haitian Revolution develops. Beginning with his service under Spanish commanders, this second trilogy installment follows his efforts to consolidate authority and secure freedom within a divided colony.

Twenty-year-old bassist Jesse finds a precarious home in a touring bar band after a difficult childhood. Over one year, his father's attempts at reconciliation and a new singer's arrival challenge his assumptions about family, music, and himself.

The concluding Haitian Revolution novel follows Toussaint Louverture and his allies as French forces attempt to reassert control. Soldiers, former slaves, and plantation families experience the conflict while Toussaint reflects on his struggle from imprisonment in France.

This biography traces Antoine Lavoisier's role in transforming chemistry through experiments, new terminology, and challenges to established explanations of combustion. Bell connects his scientific achievements with the wealth and political circumstances that endangered him during the French Revolution.

Bell explores Baltimore on foot, combining observations of its neighborhoods with accounts of its history and cultural life. His journey connects local people, architecture, food, literature, and film to the city's changing identity and social divisions.

Bell examines the life of Haiti's revolutionary leader, tracing his movement from slavery into military and political command. The biography explores Toussaint's complicated alliances, religious commitments, social position, and decisions within the struggle against colonial rule.

This historical novel portrays Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest through episodes from battlefields and private life. Moving across time, it examines his military instincts, relationships, and contradictions within a society built on slavery and transformed by civil war.

American traveler Charlie Chapo has tried to make Haitian culture his own. As the 2010 earthquake devastates Port-au-Prince, his journey into the surrounding hills becomes a confrontation with identity, belonging, and a world suddenly altered by catastrophe.

Las Vegas blackjack dealer Mae repeatedly watches footage of a former lover escaping the September 11 attacks. The images reopen memories of childhood abuse and involvement in a violent 1960s cult, drawing past and present into disturbing connection.

Stories written across two decades follow outsiders and lost souls through New York, Paris, Haiti, and London. Punks, hustlers, and other displaced figures seek connection in unfamiliar surroundings, while music and popular songs thread through their encounters.

A teenage desert excursion ends with Julie falling into a cave while escaping violence. As she lies unconscious, her friend Jamal and estranged birth mother seek ways to reach her, while Julie experiences an altered inner world.

Bell's authorized biography follows novelist Robert Stone from his difficult New York childhood through naval service, countercultural friendships, and literary work. Drawing on research and personal acquaintance, it examines his relationships, struggles, and novels about American power and corruption.