4/5/2023 0 Comments Mr jones graveyard shiftHis father, a onetime boxer, introduced his son to the sport but later abandoned the family. I put something out there - and I’m nobody - and I made it.” “One of the great things about the New Yorker,” he said in 1993, “is that they read their mail. His unsolicited manuscript was published on Dec. He sent “The Pugilist at Rest” to the New Yorker, the country’s premier outlet for short fiction. I committed unspeakable crimes and got medals for it.” “I grieved for myself and what I had lost. “There was a reservoir of malice, poison, and vicious sadism in my soul, and it poured forth freely in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam,” he wrote. Even though he did not go to Vietnam, he depicted the field of battle - and the death of the central character’s best friend - with brutal intensity. Jones wrote in about 12 hours, derived from those experiences. “The guys in my unit all got killed in Vietnam, except for one,” Mr. He was eventually diagnosed with a form of epilepsy and was granted a medical discharge. He was so badly beaten that he ended up in a psychiatric facility, suffering from headaches, double vision and other symptoms. Jones went into the ring at Camp Pendleton, Calif., to face a more experienced Marine champion. Jones’s stint in the Marines.Īn amateur boxer who had more than 150 fights in his teens, Mr. “The Pugilist at Rest,” his first and most famous story, took its title from a Greek sculpture and was inspired by Mr. One morning at home, he was drinking beer and wearing his custodian’s shirt labeled “Thomas” when he saw Kidder, the author of “The Soul of a New Machine” and other books, interviewed on television. When he finished polishing the floors during the graveyard shift, he went to the school library to read. Jones was working as a janitor at a high school in Lacey, Wash. Coraghessan Boyle and Denis Johnson, became celebrated authors.Ī decade later, Mr. He studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the early 1970s and watched as several of his classmates, including Tracy Kidder, T. But he refused to make the changes requested by the editor, and it never appeared. Jones almost found acclaim in his early 20s, when one of his stories was accepted by the Atlantic. “You have to suffer a lot before you can be a writer of fiction.” “I’m a great believer in fate, and I believe that all those things in my life had to happen - being a drunk, a boxer, the epilepsy, the diabetes,” he told the Seattle Times. Jones always thought of himself as a writer. The cause was complications from diabetes, said his wife, Sally Jones.Įven during the years when he was working in factories, pushing a broom, getting fired from jobs, battling illness and going through rehab, Mr. 14 at a medical rehabilitation facility in Olympia, Wash. Jones largely fell silent and did not publish another book for the rest of his life. Three collections of short stories came out between 19. His characters always wanted more from life than it offered. His tales reflected the troubled lives of damaged men who were boxers, Marines, heavy drinkers or blue-collar workers - all of which Mr. “The original poetry of his fictional world is irresistible.” “Writers as good as Thom Jones appear but rarely,” novelist Thomas McGuane wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1993. Jones seemed to be the rightful heir to Raymond Carver, Norman Mailer or even Ernest Hemingway. Other stories soon appeared in the Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s and Playboy, and for a few years Mr. Jones’s first collection, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. “The Pugilist at Rest” won the prestigious O. He was a high school janitor and onetime boxer who, in his late 40s, submitted a short story to the New Yorker that, against all odds, the magazine published. During the 1990s, Thom Jones rose from obscurity to become one of the brightest literary talents in the country.
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