Rachel Maddux
Rachel Maddux was an American author born on December 15, 1912, in Wichita, Kansas. From a young age, she demonstrated a remarkable talent for writing, crafting her first story at six and her first novel by nine. Although she initially pursued a career in medicine, her health issues, including epilepsy, led her to abandon medical school after two years. Instead, she embarked on a successful writing career, focusing on the lives of ordinary people during the Great Depression.
Maddux’s writing was characterized by a vivid sense of character and a deep compassion for her subjects, particularly young adults. She gained recognition for her short stories and later completed her defining novel, *The Green Kingdom*, which uniquely blended realism and fantasy to explore themes of imagination and resilience amid economic hardship. In 1960, she published *Abel's Daughter*, addressing the complexities of interracial relationships. Throughout her life, she continued to write, producing a collection of stories and a memoir that reflected her personal experiences and struggles. Maddux passed away on November 19, 1983, leaving behind a legacy that celebrates the beauty and wonder found in everyday life.
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Subject Terms
Rachel Maddux
Writer
- Born: December 15, 1912
- Birthplace: Wichita, Kansas
- Died: November 19, 1983
- Place of death: Tennessee, Ridge, Tennessee
Biography
Rachel Maddux was born on December 15, 1912, in Wichita, Kansas. With both a father, an unhappy bureaucrat, and a mother given to emotional distance, the young Maddux grew up comforted by the world created by her love of reading. Precocious and under the encouragement of her much older sister, she wrote her first story when she was six and her first novel when she was nine. In her adolescence, she absorbed the psychological realism of Willa Cather and Henry James and the short fiction of Sherwood Anderson, which illuminated the otherwise dreary, often claustrophobic lives of Midwestern Americans.
Her larger ambition was medicine, and she graduated in zoology from University of Kansas in 1934 and began medical school. However, Maddux was epileptic, and her precarious health compelled her to abandon her plans only two years into the program. During the next five years, Maddux, now living in Kansas City, began to pursue writing, initially composing short stories that vividly recreated the difficult lives of ordinary people, most often adolescents, caught up in the Depression. She found immediate success. Her vivid sense of character and compassion for young adults attracted the attention of Hollywood, and Maddux briefly toyed with the idea of pursuing screenwriting.
In 1941, she got married and her husband immediately was sent overseas to fight in World War II. Maddux, now living in California, wrote short stories during the war that explored the concerns and anxieties of the home front. Of particular note are her several stories told from the perspective of a child, especially poignant as Maddux was adjusting to the reality that her health would prevent her from ever having children.
Although Maddux enjoyed a reputation for short fiction, she had begun work on an ambitious novel, part realistic, part fantastic, that would take nearly twenty years for her to complete and would mark her defining achievement. The Green Kingdom tells the story of five characters who, amid the blasted prairie wasteland of the Depression, journey to a magical green kingdom located under a mountain in the American West. The narrative captured the economic distress familiar to Maddux but also conjured, with visionary imagination, the utopian kingdom that becomes a powerful metaphor for the reach of the imagination and the compelling magic within the everyday. Because of its audacious splicing of genres, the novel was hailed as a landmark achievement.
In 1960, Maddux published her second novel, Abel’s Daughter, which explored the dilemma of interracial relationships. Maddux and her husband moved from California to Tennessee, where they bought controlling interest in an apple orchard. Maddux lived there until her death almost twenty years later, writing a number of short stories, most of them collected and published posthumously. Her revealing memoir, The Orchard Children, detailed her and her husband’s unsuccessful attempts to adopt two children abandoned by their biological parents. Maddux died on November 19, 1983. Willing to mingle everyday realism with suggestions of magic and whimsy, Maddux captured with grace and compassion her love of the ordinary world and her compelling conviction that within its apparent dreariness lurked the most stunning expressions of wonder.