Edward P. Jones

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Edward P. Jones is an American author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Born in 1951, he was raised in Washington, D.C. and educated at both the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Virginia.

Contents 1 Career 2 Bibliography 3 Notes 4 External links

[edit] Career

Jones won both the Pen/Hemingway Award and the Lannan Foundation Grant for his first book, Lost in the City, a collection of short stories on the African American working class of the 20th century Washington, D.C. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2005 Jones was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

His second book, The Known World, is a richly imagined novel set before the Civil War in Virginia. It examines issues regarding the ownership of black slaves by free black people as well as by whites. A book with many points of view, The Known World paints an enormous canvas thick with personalities and situations that show how slavery destroys but can also be transcended. It won the National Book Award in 2004 and subsequently 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 the African-Americans revolving around 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.

The stories of his first and third book are connected. As Neely Tucker says:

"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."^[1]

In the Spring and Fall semesters of 2009, Jones was a visiting professor of creative writing at the George Washington University. ^[2]

[edit] Bibliography

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

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Official page
• An essay on Jones's work by Wyatt Mason
• Identity Theory interview
• Review of Lost in the City
• Interview on The Ledge, an independent platform for world literature. Includes audio and excerpt.
• "The Known World of Edward P. Jones", by Neely Tucker, The Washington Post, November 15, 2009 - a biographical overview of E. P. Jones