Edward P. Jones

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Template:Short description Template:Use American English Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox writer Edward Paul Jones (born October 5, 1950) is an American novelist and short story writer. He became popular for writing about the African-American experience in the United States, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award for The Known World (2003).

Journalist Neely Tucker described Jones in The Washington Post as "arguably the greatest fiction writer the nation's capital has ever produced".Template:Sfn According to biographer Diane Brady of Fortune, Jones has been recognized "as one of the finest writers of his generation".Template:Sfn He has been a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, George Mason University, the University of Maryland, and Princeton University. In 2010, Jones became a professor of literature at George Washington University, where he was previously the Wang Visiting Professor in Contemporary English Literature.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Early life and education

Jones was born in Washington, D.C., where he was raised in poor all-black neighborhoods.Template:Sfn When he was two years old, his father, a Jamaican immigrant, left the family. Jones's mother, Jeanette M. Jones, had been pregnant at the time with a third child, Jones' sister Eunice, who eventually died of lung cancer in 1973.Template:Sfn Jones' only brother Joseph was born mentally disabled.Template:Sfn The family resided in a series of impoverished shacks and tenements northwest of D.C.'s center, ultimately moving place-to-place 18 times in 18 years.Template:Sfn

Jones was recognized for talents in mathematics and literature as a child.Template:Sfn At the age of five, Jones was sent to a Catholic school, where his performance enabled him to skip a grade, but his mother could not afford the tuition and withdrew him.Template:Sfn He spent his early education at Walker-Jones Elementary School, Shaw Junior High School, then finally at the local Cardozo High School,Template:Sfn where he performed well academically. Jones graduated as an honors student in English, although he had to sign his own report cards as his mother was illiterate.<ref name="NYT">Template:Cite web</ref>Template:Sfn

In the fall of 1968, Jones enrolled into the College of the Holy Cross with the initial intent to study mathematics.Template:Sfn He wrote for the school newspaper, The Crusader, and was a member of the college's Black Student Union along with classmates Clarence Thomas, Ted Wells, and Ed Jenkins.Template:Sfn After taking a nineteenth-century novel class at the college, Jones found a passion for writing.Template:Sfn He graduated from Holy Cross with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in English in 1972.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1979, Jones entered the University of Virginia to pursue graduate studies in creative writing, receiving a Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in 1981.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Career

His first book, Lost in the City (1992), is a collection of short stories about the African-American working class in 20th-century Washington, D.C. In the early stories are some who are like first-generation immigrants, as they have come to the city as part of the Great Migration from the rural South.

His second book, The Known World, was set in a fictional Virginia county and had a protagonist who was a Black planter and slaveholder. It won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International Dublin Literary Award.

Jones's third book, All Aunt Hagar's Children, was published in 2006. Like Lost in the City, it is a collection of short stories that deal with African Americans, mostly in Washington, D.C. Several of the stories had been previously published in The New Yorker magazine. The stories in the book take up the lives of ancillary characters in Lost in the City. In 2007, it was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, which was won by Philip Roth's Everyman.

The stories of Jones' first and third book are connected. As Wyatt Mason wrote in Harper's Magazine in 2006:

The fourteen stories of All Aunt Hagar's Children revisit not merely the city of Washington but the fourteen stories of Lost in the City. Each new story—and many of them, in their completeness, feel like fully realized little novels—is connected in the same sequence, as if umbilically, to the corresponding story in the first book. Literature is, of course, littered with sequels—its Rabbits and Bechs; its Zuckermans and Kepeshes—but this is not, in the main, Jones’s idea of a reprise. Each revisitation provides a different kind of interplay between the two collections.<ref name=mason>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Neely Tucker wrote in 2009:

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In the spring and fall semesters of 2009, Jones was a visiting professor of creative writing at the George Washington University.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In fall 2010 he joined the English department faculty to teach creative writing.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Awards and nominations

Bibliography

Notes

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Additional references

Template:PulitzerPrize Fiction 2001–2025 Template:International Dublin Literary Award

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