His first historical novel,
All Souls' Rising, was named a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. This novel, which plunges into the violent nineteenth-century slave rebellions in Haiti, marked not only a new level of critical recognition but also a turning point in Bell's career, as he moved from earlier depictions of disenfranchised individuals in modern urban America to a more sweeping portrayal of a whole people struggling for acceptance as human beings. Despite his occasionally grim subject matter, Bell's short fiction is leavened by the same buoyant and exuberant style that has characterized his longer works.
Bell was born in Nashville, Tennessee, the son of Henry Denmark Bell and Allen (Wigginton) Bell. His father practiced law and his mother simultaneously managed a riding school and worked the farm that Bell grew up on in Williamson County. After graduating from Princeton University in 1979, Bell went on to receive a master's degree from Hollins College in 1981. He developed an intense interest in the authors involved in the regional literary movement of the 1930s known as the Southern Renascence or Agrarian Movement and wrote his master's thesis on Madison Jones.
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