Born in Nashville, Tennessee, on 1 August 1957, Bell grew up as an only child in rather unusual circumstances. At the time his parents married, they purchased ninety-six acres in the rural stretches of Williamson County with the intention of living on a farm. His father, Henry Denmark Bell, was a Nashville lawyer who eventually turned circuit judge in Franklin, Tennessee. His mother, née Georgia Allen Wigginton, a talented horsewoman, taught riding lessons and presided over a summer camp while also managing the farmstead. The plan was in part to create the anti-industrial existence described by the Southern Agrarians in the now-famous collection I'll Take My Stand (1930). With the help of a hired hand named Benjamin Taylor, who resided on the property as a tenant, the Bells lived a genuine farm life with horses, cows, hogs, sheep, and a garden. As Bell recounts in his autobiographical essay "One Art" (1992), "Mine was an atavistic childhood."
Some of his earliest memories are connected to foaling and farm chores, images that occasionally surface in his fiction. Yet, the Bell household also provided a cultured atmosphere, with family friends such as Andrew Lytle, Allen Tate, and other writers of the Southern Renascence dropping by as guests.
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