Washington Post, The Known World of Edward P. Jones, by Neely Tucker:
Edward Paul Jones is sitting at a table in Guapo's restaurant in Tenleytown early on a midsummer evening, looking down into a glass of red wine. Nobody in the place recognizes him, although he's arguably the greatest fiction writer the nation's capital has ever produced.
His three books, two of them collections of short stories set in black Washington, have been hailed as masterpieces. He's won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critic's Circle award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, a MacArthur "genius grant," the Lannan Literary Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a bunch of (by comparison) trifling stuff. He's won nearly $1 million in literary awards alone, never mind earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties. …
Jones spent 10 years creating nearly all of his Pulitzer-winning, antebellum-era novel, "The Known World," in his head, until he finally set it all down on paper in a three-month rush in 2001 after being laid off from his job at a tax publication. …
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. …
(Hat Tip: Geogre Yin.)
