Waco's Novelist

Most of the citizens of Waco, Texas (pop. 84,706) don't know it yet, but one of their most prominent neighbors is about to become a famous writer. Waco knows Madison Alexander Cooper Jr., 57, as a wealthy, friendly man who owns so much real estate that it takes all his time to manage it. But, until a few days ago, not even his close friends knew what Bachelor Cooper has been doing a good many quiet mornings and nights in the attic office in his big, late-Victorian house. For eleven years, Neighbor Cooper has been writing a novel.

This week Waco will learn that the book has won the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship ($2,400) and will be published next fall with all the fanfare that accompanies the launching of a potential bestseller.

Sentimental Texas. None of this is so remarkable as the fact that Author Cooper's book is to be published at all. Its 2,870 pages (840,000 words) will make it the longest U.S. novel in many a year. It will have to be brought out in two volumes at about $10. Moreover, it is a first novel, though Cooper wrote and destroyed another one a quarter-century ago when a literary agent said it was no good. Cooper knew that the odds were much against his finding a publisher. He sent Houghton Mifflin an apologetic note: "Your reader is going to say what the hell, and I don't blame him." Instead, the readers formed a Cooper cheering section. Wrote one of them: "For my part, I want no editing. I think every word important."

Author Cooper's untitled book is a sprawling story of a Texas town during the first 20 years of the 20th century. Sentimental and nostalgic, it contrasts the old South with the new Southwest, lets its young hero illustrate the sound, old-fashioned theme "that it's what you put into life that matters and not what you try to grab out of it." Waco folks will undoubtedly be looking for themselves and their neighbors among the book's huge cast of characters. Cooper says they'll have no luck: all of his people are made up, "and I like some of them better than I do my friends at home."

Captain with a Memory. Cooper graduated from the University of Texas in 1915, and was a captain of infantry in World War I. After the war, he plunged into the business and social life of Waco, where his father was a wealthy wholesaler, but it was not quite enough. He began to write slick-magazine stories--"the kind that not even a Texan would brag about." But he was serious enough to take correspondence courses in story writing from Columbia University. Nothing much came of it for a long time, though Cooper discovered that "I have a freak memory--I can remember indefinitely anything that is not important." Of his prizewinning novel he says: "I'm still amazed. I'd resigned myself to years of shipping it around." What is he thinking of calling it? Cooper points to the attic trunk where he used to hide his manuscripts when friends dropped in: "I've hit my knee and torn my pants on that trunk so many times that I've taken to calling the whole thing just Ugh."

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