Arkansas biography collection life notable
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Owen Vincent Madden (1891–1965)
Owen Vincent “Owney” Madden was a gangster and underworld boss in New York City in the 1920s who retired to Hot Springs (Garland County) in the 1930s. Though his role in Arkansas politics and history will forever remain enigmatic, he was a powerful figure (from about 1935 until his death) during the heyday of illegal gambling in Hot Springs and an emblem of the bad old days of machine politics.
Owney Madden was born on December 18, 1891, in Leeds, England, to Irish parents, Francis and Mary Madden. He spent his early childhood in Wigan and Liverpool, where Francis worked in textile mill sweatshops until his death in 1902. Mary then took her family, including Madden and perhaps two siblings, to New York. They settled in a crime-ridden Manhattan district along Tenth Avenue known as Hell’s Kitchen. She worked as a scrubwoman, while Madden sporadically attended St. Michael’s Parochial School on West 33rd Street.
According to his own account, Madden c
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John Edward Williams (1922–1994)
John Edward Williams, now considered a major twentieth-century American novelist but unheralded while living, spent the last several years of his life in Fayetteville (Washington County). Williams’s reputation stands primarily on his three major novels: Butcher’s Crossing (1960), Stoner (1965), and Augustus (1972); Augustus shared the National Book Award in 1973, the first instance of the award being split. But it was the 2006 republication of Stoner, which had originally sold only around 2,000 copies in 1965, by the New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics series that made William famous.
John Edward Williams was born on August 29, 1922, in Clarksville, Texas, and raised in Wichita Falls, Texas, an oil-boom town where his father, John Edward Jewell, tried and failed to find his fortune. Family lore claimed that Jewell was shot dead by a hitchhiker who robbed him of cash made in a land transaction, but Williams’s biographer, Charles J. Sh
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