Edward P. Jones

Edward Paul Jones (born October 5, 1950) is an American novelist and short story writer. His 2003 novel The Known World received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Biography

Edward Paul Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and educated at both the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Virginia.

His first book, Lost in the City, 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 mixed-race black planter and slaveholder. It won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC 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.

Neely Tucker wrote in 2009:

It's gone almost completely unnoticed, but the two collections are a matched set: There are 14 stories in Lost, ordered from the youngest to the oldest character, and there are 14 stories in Hagar's, also ordered from youngest to oldest character. The first story in the first book is connected to the first story in the second book, and so on. To get the full history of the characters, one must read the first story in each book, then go to the second story in each, and so on.

In the spring and fall semesters of 2009, Jones was a visiting professor of creative writing at the George Washington University. In fall 2010 he joined the English department faculty to teach creative writing.

Awards and nominations

• 1992: Nominated National Book Award, Lost in the City
• 1993: Awarded PEN/Hemingway Award, Lost in the City
• 1994: Awarded Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Lost in the City
• 2003: Nominated National Book Award, The Known World
• 2003: Awarded National Book Critics Circle Award, The Known World
• 2004: Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Known World
• 2005: Awarded International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Known World
• 2005: Awarded MacArthur Fellowship
• 2007: Nominated PEN/Faulkner Award, All Aunt Hagar's Children
• 2010: Awarded PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story

Bibliography

• Lost in the City (1992)
• The Known World (2003)
• All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006)

Notes

External links

• Publisher's official page
• Hilton Als (Winter 2013). "Edward P. Jones, The Art of Fiction No. 222". The Paris Review. 

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