Early life and education
Jones was born in Washington, D.C., where he was raised in poor all-black neighborhoods. When he was two-years-old, his father, a Jamaican immigrant, left the family. Jones's mother, Jeanette M. Jones, had been pregnant at the time with a third child, Jones' sister Eunice, who eventually died of lung cancer in 1973. Jones' only brother Joseph was born mentally disabled. The family resided in a series of impoverished shacks and tenements northwest of D.C.'s center, ultimately moving place-to-place 18 times in 18 years.
Jones was recognized for talents in mathematics and literature. At the age of five, Jones was sent to a Catholic school, where his performance enabled him to skip a grade, but his mother could not afford the tuition and withdrew him. He spent his early education at Walker-Jones Elementary School, Shaw Junior High School, then finally at the local Cardozo High School, where he performed well academically. Jones graduated as an honors student in English, although he had to sign his own report cards as his mother was illiterate. [10]
In the fall of 1968, Jones enrolled into the College of the Holy Cross with the initial intent to study mathematics. He wrote for the school newspaper, The Crusader, and was a member of the college's Black Student Union along with classmates Clarence Thomas, Ted Wells, and Ed Jenkins. After taking a nineteenth-century novel class, Jones found a passion for writing. He graduated from Holy Cross with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in English in 1972. [15]
In 1979, Jones entered the University of Virginia to pursue graduate studies in creative writing, receiving a Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in 1981. [16]
Career
His first book, Lost in the City (1992), 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 Black planter and slaveholder. It won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International 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. [17]
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. [18]
In the spring and fall semesters of 2009, Jones was a visiting professor of creative writing at the George Washington University. [19] In fall 2010 he joined the English department faculty to teach creative writing. [20]
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