Waco (0626)
A native of Waco, TX, Madison Cooper inherited a fortune and his family’s wholesale grocery business, leaving him free to enjoy a life of non-conformity and secret literary pursuits. His home at 1801 Austin Avenue is now headquarters of the Cooper Foundation. Writing in an attic room of the mansion, he first produced a story, The Catch of Sironia, that won over hundreds of entries in an Antioch College contest. In 1952 Waco was stunned to learn that the novel Cooper had been writing for eleven years would be published as a Houghton-Mifflin Fellowship winner and as the longest novel ever printed by an American. The two-volume, 850,000 word Sironia, Texas reports life in a Texas town modeled after Waco from 1900 to 1921 and is the length of eight average novels. Before his death, a second novel, The Haunted Hacienda, was published.
Updated September 4, 2006