“He didn’t see a doctor, he says, until he was 17. His first dental visit was at 22. He labored for years as a proofreader or columnist for an obscure journal called Tax Notes. He wrote “Lost in the City” while working there in the late 1980s and early ’90s. For most of the next decade, he wrote nothing but was thinking deeply about “The Known World,” the tale of a black slave owner in Virginia. When he was laid off after 19 years, they gave him two weeks’ severance. He lived on unemployment benefits while he hammered out the book in a dozen weeks. (It wasn’t that hard, he said in interviews after its publication; he had almost the entire book mapped out in his head before he sat down to write.) It won the Pulitzer Prize.”
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Article on Edward Jones in the Post. Worth reading in full, although it’s a typical bio-feature in that it spends too long elaborating on his hermitage and not long enough talking about his fiction. In my opinion. But still good.
I think I got the link from The Millions. Thanks, guys!
Also, audience poll: short stories or Known World? I pick short stories (Lost in the City particularly) a thousand times over.
