Edward P. Jones Biography
Over the past 14 years Edward P. Jones has earned more than $500,000 in book
prizes (including The PEN/Hemingway Award for Lost in The City and the Pulitzer,
National Book Critics Circle Award and Lannan Literary Award for The Known
World, plus a MacArthur "genius" grant). In addition, he has
published three books, taught fiction at Princeton University, George Mason
University, and the University of Maryland and been published in a variety of
magazines. However, money is of little interest to him - he lives in a building
at the top of Embassy Row in Washington D.C. (having recently moved from a noisy
apartment in Arlington, VA) but despite having lived there for two years, has
very little in the way of furniture. When he first moved into his
apartment, friends took him shopping but after the third week of couch-hunting
he gave up - it was too much bother. However, he does own several hundred
books and a collection of American stamps and miniature Japanese carvings!
In a recent interview in Publishers Weekly he told the reporter, "Tonight when I
go to bed ... I'll lay down on a pallet on the carpet". He says that he doesn't
want to travel, has no interest in fancy cars or clothes. In the morning
he writes two or three pages and in the evening watches DVDs or Court TV; he
says, "You could have a splendid apartment with all this gorgeous furniture and
wonderful things on the wall, and if you don't have those two or three pages
behind you, it's a terrible existence."
He was born and raised in Washington, D.C. His childhood was spent in poverty.
His mother, Jeanette, migrated from the South in the 1940s (at the beginning of
the migration that saw about 5 million African-Americans relocate to the North);
although she was illiterate herself, she encouraged her son's bookishness,
recognizing the importance of education; his Jamaican father left when Jones was
three, around the same time Jones's younger brother, who is mentally retarded,
was institutionalized. Jones, his mother (who worked as a dishwasher and
cleaner) and younger sister Eunice, moved 18 times during the next 18 years.
He says, "Each place was worse than the place before". When he was 12 or
13 he simply stopped going outside to play with other children; "I would just
come home from school and watch TV and read books" At first he read comics
but then he discovered Black Boy and Native
Son, both by Richard Wright at his aunt's house, and from there progressed
to James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Truman Capote. He says, "I was quite
struck by the Southern authors, both white and black".
With the guidance of Joseph Owens, a young Catholic missionary, Jones applied to
Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, where he was accepted and awarded a
scholarship - becoming the first person in his family to attend college.
He graduated with a degree in English and then returned to Washington where he
worked odd jobs while looking after his mother who had had several heart
attacks. She died in 1975 and Jones hit rock bottom - he couldn't find a job and
was homeless. Eventually he wrote to his sister, Eunice, asking for $15 so
he could take a bus to New York where he hoped to improve his prospects - the
same week the money arrived he found a job in Washington working for Science
magazine and received a message from Essence magazine offering him $400
for a story he'd submitted a year earlier. These breaks helped him get his life
back on track and he worked steadily for a few years in Washington before
enrolling in the MFA program at the University of Virginia. When he
graduated in 1981 he took a job with Tax Analysts in Arlington, VA, where he
worked for 18 years as a proofreader, and then as a writer, summarizing tax
stories for the news.
Meanwhile he wrote - in 1992 Lost In The City was published and he started
work on The Known World. He says that he spent 10 years brooding
over the story, writing the entire thing in his head, so when it came time to
writing it down he was able to produce the entire 432 manuscript in just three
months. All Aunt Hagar's Children, a collection of short stories, was
published in September 2006.
All his books to date have been dedicated to his mother, Jeanette.
This biography was last updated on 08/01/2006.
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