Jerry David Madden was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of James Helvy and Emile Merritt Madden. He has stated that "my infatuation with my hometown is similar to Thomas Wolfe's with Asheville and like Wolfe I look homeward but live elsewhere." Greatly influenced by his grandmother and her story telling, he began early to tell his own stories; at age eleven he wrote down the first one and during his education in the Knoxville public schools was nearly expelled on many occasions for writing stories in class. As a youth in Knoxville, he worked at many odd jobs, his favorite being as an usher at the Bijou Theater, which his "mother had used as a babysitter while she worked during the depression and the war." By the time he was fourteen he had the same literary agent as Raymond Chandler and MacKinlay Kantor." More. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 6: American Novelists Since World War II, Second Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by James E. Kibler Jr., University of Georgia. The Gale Group, 1980. pp. 192-201.

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