Edward P. Jones -- Traveling Far in the Known and Artful Worlds

October 29, 2003

It's almost a given that anyone who achieves distinction as a writer will have started reading at an early age, encouraged by a sympathetic adult.

Such was the case with Edward P. Jones, whose highly praised first novel, The Known World (Amistad/HarperCollins), a September/October Book Sense 76 pick, has been nominated for this year's National Book Award.

But for the 53-year-old Jones, author of an earlier collection of short stories (Lost in the City, Morrow, 1992) and winner, in 1994, of the Lannan Literary Award, these key elements came with a twist.

"When I was seven, eight, nine, I started out reading what we in Washington [D.C.] called 'funny books' but the rest of the world called 'comic books,'" said Jones, on the telephone from San Francisco, in the midst of a 23-city tour for The Known World.

Jones was 13 before he read his first "book without pictures," he recalled. "I was visiting an aunt in Virginia, and I ran out of comic books, and my cousin had this mystery -- Who Killed Stella Pomeroy? -- and I started reading that. And I found that I could live with reading things that didn't have pictures."

The encouraging adult who endorsed Jones' exploration of all available printed matter was his mother -- though she herself could not read or write.

"I think the major influence on my life was my mother," Jones said. "She wanted me to get the best education that I possibly could. And more than that -- she'd wash dishes, she cleaned hotel rooms, and that's how she took care of her [three] children. And I think I was influenced by the fact that she got up every day and went out and worked as hard as she possibly could. And that meant something to me -- because I knew she was out there working for me."

Visiting another aunt in Brooklyn, the young Jones discovered more books. "She had Richard Wright's Native Son," said Jones. "And there was also an autobiography of the actress Ethel Waters, called His Eye Is on the Sparrow. I read those, and that just solidified my sense that there was a lot to be found in books that didn't have pictures. I started weaning myself off of reading comic books, so that by the time I entered high school, I was reading a good bit."

A high school teacher gave Jones a paperback of Wright's Black Boy, in the back of which was a form to order more titles from the publisher. "I ordered James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, and an autobiography of a woman in a slum in Brazil," Jones noted.

The teenage Jones began going to bookstores, where he found additional black authors, as well as white Southern writers, such as Erskine Caldwell and Truman Capote, later William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.

"The interesting thing about all that -- Southern people, black and white -- is that I'd grown up with adults who had all been born and raised in the South," said Jones. "So reading these Southern authors was like going home again, in a certain sense, because the stories sounded so familiar. The people sounded familiar.

The world that they were talking about in those novels sounded quite familiar."

The world Jones knew opened much wider once he got to college, an event prompted by a somewhat unexpected event: a Jesuit teacher knocked on his door.

"I think I may have been a sophomore or a junior in high school," remembered Jones, "and this guy -- he wasn't a priest then, but he was in a priestly outfit -- he was riding around the neighborhood [on a bicycle]; and he knocked on my door and just started a conversation. He was teaching at (the College of the) Holy Cross (in Worcester, Massachusetts) at that time, philosophy, I believe. And we stayed in touch.... He told me I should apply to Holy Cross ... so I applied to Holy Cross, and they said yes. And I went off and found myself further away from home than I'd ever been before."

In college, Jones took a writing course and, encouraged by his instructor, sporadically wrote short stories but never submitted them for publication. After his mother died on New Year's Day, 1975, Jones went to stay in Philadelphia with the parents of a college roommate. There the 25-year-old wrote a short story that he sent to Essence magazine, but he received no response.

A seemingly directionless Jones returned to Washington, D.C. "Sometimes I was homeless," he said. "Sometimes I was without a job. And by the next year, September of 1976, I was sort of fed up with Washington, and I asked my sister to send me money for a one-way ticket to New York, thinking that I might be able to find a better life there."

But fate, Jones said, had something else in store for him. "That week, I found a job (at Science magazine). And also, the people in Philadelphia forwarded what was called a Mailgram to me [from Essence] that said my story was being published the very next month. All this, in the same one week. I found a room in Washington, and I got on with my life."

Jones eventually went to graduate school at the University of Virginia, where he wrote more stories and earned an MFA. In 1983, he got a job in Arlington, Virginia, and began thinking about the tales for Lost in the City, a book that he started in 1988 but that would not be published until 1992.

"I don't get up every morning and write with discipline," explained Jones, who is unmarried and who has taught at various colleges and held other magazine jobs. "I take a lot of time to think things out."

So it was with the novel that became The Known World, a saga of a freed black man owning slaves in 1840s Virginia. "I started thinking about it in '92," said Jones. "I kept telling myself ... I had to do ... research, but I kept putting that off. Well, the years of not doing research piled up.

"But in the meantime, I was working the whole novel out in my head ... so that in 2001, when I had five weeks' vacation from my day job, it took me only about two and a half months or so to do the first draft. And by about June, early July, I was ready to send it off to the agent."

Still, it had been so long since Jones had had any contact with that agent, he said, that he didn't feel comfortable placing a telephone call. "I sent him a letter," Jones said.

And the writer had no confidence that the manuscript he'd worked on for so long, in his head, and then on paper, would meet with his agent's approval, let alone find a publisher. "Because, you know, I don't share my work [in progress]. So I'm hoping what I'm doing is the very best that I possibly can do -- but I have no idea," he explained.

Didn't winning the Lannan (as well as an earlier NEA grant), give Jones' authorial confidence a boost?

"It did," he agreed. "It did. But ... all the nice things people say in reviews, and whatever prizes you get -- that's for past work. You get up tomorrow, and you still have to do that page, that chapter, that paragraph.

"And all the wonderful things ... won't help you write that."

As it happened, Edward P. Jones had no cause for worry. The Known World pleased his agent, was bought by the first publisher who saw it, and won favor with major literary critics including Janet Maslin and Jonathan Yardley.

Now Jones is at work on another collection of stories, scheduled for delivery to Amistad in February.

In the meantime, the National Book Award ceremony -- with Edward P. Jones nominated in the fiction category along with T.C. Boyle, Marianne Wiggins, Shirley Hazzard, and Scott Spencer -- will be held on November 19.

Jones has traveled quite a distance, in the known and artful worlds, from the boy who started out reading comic books, and who learned from a mystery novel that you could make pictures with words alone.

It's not a distance he cares to retrace, in certain ways, Jones said.

"Last year, a friend of mine -- I've been living next to his grandparents for 20 years -- went on the Internet and found me a copy of Who Killed Stella Pomeroy?! I haven't read it as yet, because somehow -- what I read in 1954 remains in my head in a certain way, and I haven't yet had the courage to open this one up." -- Tom Nolan

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