I retrieved this from my files.

October 16, 2003
Sweet Reward: From Unemployed to Award Finalist
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 — After Edward P. Jones lost his job last year, he hunkered down for months at his secondhand computer in an apartment cluttered with newspapers and discarded manuscripts.

He had never considered writing fiction full time before. Mr. Jones was the author of an acclaimed collection of short stories and the winner of a $50,000 literary prize, but he was also the son of an illiterate and impoverished mother. As a young man he lived briefly in a homeless shelter and learned to view a steady paycheck the same way that a drowning man might view a lifeline.

"To think about being a writer was to think that I had the whole world, and I really didn't, and I knew I didn't," said Mr. Jones, 53, who spent nearly two decades proofreading and summarizing news items for Tax Notes, a trade magazine, before he was laid off in January 2002.

But he decided to dive into his first novel without much of a safety net. To his astonishment, his tale of a black slave owner, an aching and lyrical exploration of moral complexities, has become a literary sensation since its publication in August. Janet Maslin in The New York Times called that novel, "The Known World" (Amistad/HarperCollins), stunning. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post hailed it as the best new American fiction to cross his desk in years.

On Wednesday his novel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.

"My goodness," said Mr. Jones, who was taken aback by the news. "My goodness."

The rapturous reception to his novel has caught him entirely unprepared. When the first reviews appeared, he had no car, no cellphone and no fax machine to cope with the flurry of interview requests. Now he has a a driver to ferry him to literary events and a fax machine, all courtesy of his publisher. He has decided against buying a cellphone, fearing it could seem too pretentious.

With his novel in its fifth printing, a national book tour will take Mr. Jones to the Barnes & Noble store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan Thursday night and to the Schermerhorn Row Gallery at South Street Seaport on Friday.

On first meeting he seems shy and bookish, a plain-spoken black man with a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses that seem to dwarf much of his face. He describes himself as a melancholy soul who moved so often as a boy that he withdrew into himself, burrowing so deeply into his studies, his comic books and literature that for a while he lost the ability to make friends.

He grew up in Washington, in segregated neighborhoods and in hard times, experiences that friends and colleagues say have shaped his worldview and his writing.

"He saw the world divided when he was very small into folks who didn't have jobs and folks who did," said Shirley Grossman, 81, a longtime colleague from Tax Notes and one of his best friends. "His feeling for the common man, instead of the guy who's gotten there, is very strong."

His mother washed dishes and scrubbed floors as a maid after her husband left her, and she and her three children drifted from one place to another, moving more than 18 times before Mr. Jones graduated from Cardozo High School here. He was an English honors student who had to sign his mother's name to his report cards because she could not.

A chance meeting with a Jesuit teacher who was riding a bicycle through Mr. Jones's neighborhood led him to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. Several years later he met John Casey, the author of "Spartina," who pointed him to the University of Virginia, where he studied creative writing and received a master's degree in fine arts.

In 1982, after bouts of unemployment, odd jobs and university teaching positions, he found the post as a proofreader at Tax Notes in Arlington, Va., where a steady income let him breathe easily for the first time in years.

Later he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which allowed him to work part time while writing short stories. His collection, "Lost in the City," published by William Morrow & Company in 1992, was about black residents of Washington struggling to keep their lives and community together. It was a National Book Award finalist, and in 1994 Mr. Jones won the Lannan Literary Award; he tucked away its $50,000 prize for hard times.

Over the years he has remained somewhat solitary, somewhat eccentric and always careful about money.

He never married and has no children. He spends much of his time alone in his Arlington apartment, writing, watching movies on video, taping his favorite television program ("Judge Judy") and reading from his enormous collection of novels and short stories.

Until recently, he said, he had never traveled west of Indiana, never had cable television and never surfed the Internet. He saw people using the Internet at the public library, but hesitated to try it himself. ("I never felt like I knew what buttons to push," he said.)

What he has is an affinity for the past and a keen ear for the voices of ordinary black people, particularly Southerners who were swept up in the migration that carried so many people like his mother to big cities in the North.

The stories in "Lost in the City" are set in the 1950's through the early 80's in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, where he grew up. "The Known World" is set in the 1800's. The thread that unites these books is a passion for overlooked people and places.

"I was impressed sentence by sentence by sentence," said John Edgar Wideman, the novelist and professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts, who recommends "Lost in the City" to his students.

"His particular background and experience is embodied in his work, but it's how he embodied it which is important," Mr. Wideman said of Mr. Jones. "He's a craftsman. He's an artist. I looked forward to him as a voice that would have something important to say about America."

For his novel Mr. Jones populated an imaginary place called Manchester County, Va., which is 1840 had "2,191 slaves, 142 free Negroes, 939 whites, and 136 Indians, most of them Cherokee but with a sprinkling of Choctaw." Among them is Henry Townsend, a prominent black man, who dies and leaves his wife, Caldonia, 33 slaves.

The story is based on an unsettling snippet of history that he discovered in college: some free black men owned slaves in the 1800's. Slowly over the last decade the characters took shape in his mind, particularly the figure of Townsend, a shoemaker who won his freedom and then bought his own people.

Mr. Jones built this imaginary world in his head as he collected and summarized news about tax shelters, Social Security reform and estate taxes for Tax Notes. For 10 years he rarely wrote any of his novel, which was sometimes difficult to explain to his agent and editors.

"I would say, `I'm working it out in my head,' " he said. "People don't see that as writing.

"But I can see the people and I can hear them," he said of his characters. "I would just go over and over and over it in my head. That's the most important thing, even before they have names."

He planned to focus on people, not issues. But his characters inevitably explore the meaning of freedom in a society in which blacks and whites wrestle with the moral taint of slavery.

Augustus Townsend, the protagonist's father and a free man, is sold back into slavery by white men who ridicule the notion of a free black man. John Skiffington, a white sheriff, fights for his own sense of humanity in a job that rewards cruelty, not kindness. William Robbins, a white slave master, loves his free black mistress more than he loves his white wife, but threatens to sell her into slavery to control her.

There are also glimmers of beauty in this hard world. Elias, a runaway slave mutilated by his owner, carves a crooked wooden comb as a love offering for Celeste, a crippled slave who has never owned anything other than the food in her stomach and the clothes on her back.

"It ain't much," Elias tells her.

"It be the whole world," Celeste tells him.

Mr. Jones completed the novel's first draft three months after he lost his job, spending a year living off his savings, two months' severance pay and six months of unemployment benefits. Early this year he received a comfortable advance for "The Known World" and a forthcoming collection of short stories.

He has not held a steady job for nearly two years and, for the first time in his life, he is not anxious about finding one. Mr. Jones still remembers the day his agent told him that he was getting a real advance for "The Known World" and the new collection of stories, so he could stop worrying about a consistent paycheck and begin focusing on being a writer.

"It was then, I think," Mr. Jones said, "that I began to have just an inkling that I was worth something."