Thom Jones

Background

Thom Jones was born on January 26, 1945 in Aurora, Illinois, United States.

Education

Thom Jones was raised in Aurora, Illinois, where he went to public schools. After that he went to college at the University of Hawaii.

Later Thom attended the University of Washington, from which he graduated in 1970. He studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, from which he received Master of Fine Arts degree in 1973.

Career

Johes worked as a copywriter for a Chicago advertising agency and later as a janitor, reading and writing for hours every day.

Thom Jones made his literary debut in The New Yorker in 1991. Within six months his stories appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Mirabella, Story, Buzz, and in The New Yorker twice more.

Jones wrote The Pugilist at Rest in 1993. Jones’s own experiences of boxing for a living and of suffering with a form of epilepsy due to injuries inflicted in the ring inform several of the stories in The Pugilist at Rest.

Achievements

• Jones was eulogized in The New Yorker Magazine, by Joyce Carol Oates.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Night Train: New and Selected Stories

    (From the award-winning author of story collections The Pu...)

  • Cold Snap: Stories

    (A collection of short works brings readers to the disease...)

    1995
  • Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine: Stories

    (Twelve stories that teeter between wicked humor and sting...)

    2000
  • The Pugilist at Rest: Stories

    ("The Pugilist at Rest" - the title story from this stunni...)

    1994
  • Introduction to Forensic Science

    (This course manual is geared toward introductory college ...)

    2014
  • The Dark City: The Guardians of Elestra

    (The Dark City is the first book in the Guardians of Elest...)

    2011

Views

Quotations: “Writing is more important to me than my own life—I never really wanted to do or be anything other than a writer. And yet ... I was lazy about it. I suppose if you’re serious about something and you fail, then you have to acknowledge that you’re a failure. By being lazy, you can excuse yourself—there’s always the possibility that you could be successful if you really tried.”

“The strange thing is that I really don’t like Nietzsche that much. My background probably also influenced the concern with masculinity in those stories. As a child I had conflicts with my father and stepfather, and I’ve never liked people—particularly men—pushing me around. This is probably why I got into boxing. I got fired from jobs because I refused to take orders and if I felt threatened, I was prepared to react in an extreme manner. A lot of those emotions and conflicts are revealed in the writing. I suppose it was kind of cathartic to write those stories. Recently, since I’ve received some recognition, the tone of my work has been shifting, becoming a bit more positive and upbeat.”

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Part of what Jones manages in these eleven stories (besides declaring his arrival as an audacious and Powerful talent) is to keep us laughing, albeit in the dark growls of one offended,” wrote Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Fred Schruers. Other critics remarked on Jones’s ability to add a comedic touch to the depressing scenarios he invokes without degrading the sympathy one should feel for his hard-pressed characters. Judith Wynn of Tribune Books emphasized the author’s tendency to take a seemingly hopeless situation and turn it into a source of wisdom: “Thom Jones takes the events of what seems to have been a rough-and-tumble life and sets them to the deeper rhythms of reflection and self-insight.” Many critics expressed the sentiment contained in novelist Thomas McGuane’s review of The Pugilist at Rest in the New York Times Book Review: “Writers as good as Thom Jones appear but rarely. The original poetry of his fictional world is irresistible, and the sense that he knows this world absolutely has cleansed his prose and produced an affectless sheen.